Mourning the Loss of Bob Slate Stationer and Musing on the Role of Library Preservation

Justin and Mallory say goodbye.

A love story: A family’s memories, thanks to a stationery store, by Joan Wickersham. (Boston Globe, 2/18/2011)

Excerpt: Paper may be cumbersome and old-fashioned, but it endures.

Libraries wrestle with how to preserve and store documents in an era when fewer and fewer documents exist as physical objects. How can websites, blogs, e-mails, and text messages — the written records of the early 21st century — be saved now for future historians, who will be interested not only in the famous but also in the mundane ways in which we all record and describe daily life?

Among the thousands of objects preserved in Harvard’s Schlesinger Library, devoted to women’s history, is Amelia Earhart’s baby book, a white leather volume with gold letters that spell out, grandly, “BABY’S KINGDOM.’’ It’s fascinating both for its importance and its unimportance: an artifact of a great woman, but also a glimpse of early 20th-century attitudes toward motherhood. Today a new mother might keep a blog. But a blog is just content, with no physical embodiment. A book can survive because the content is united to an object: paper.

Much as I appreciate the speed and convenience of e-mails, blogs, and phone calls, I will never happily say goodbye to paper, my first, and enduring, love. And while I can probably find some nice virtual stationery stores online, I will mourn Bob Slate when it closes: the actual physical store, where I used to buy the beautiful physical object.