Keeping Book

Will Leitch, writing for The Washington Post, has a wonderful story about baseball scorebooks and what they mean.

A score book gives us what our computers and social media posts can’t: an actual, physical record of what we did, where we did it and who we did it with. A memento, which is to say a memory. It’s not something I have to upload to the cloud. It’s not something I have to subscribe to. It’s not something I have to hope isn’t bought by some private equity firm that will one day liquidate the software that hosts it. It’s a book. With names. Of people I saw, of people I knew, of a life I have lived.

No wonder young adults — the ones I saw at Busch Stadium told me gleefully they were already on their second score books — are embracing something so old-fashioned. Raised on an internet built to vanish, they are seeking out the analog, whether it’s vinyl, or hardcover books, or even a good-old-fashioned diary. They understand what is slowly dawning on Gen X and the boomers: In this age of digital impermanence, you can only really count on things you can hold in your own hands.