Hold It.

As you know if you are a regular reader of Ad Aged, of if you're unlucky enough to know me in real life, I toss nickels around like manhole covers. I'm not cheap. I just like to think before I spend. I want to make sure I'm getting something special before I shell out the ducats.

I bought a new Pelikan Classic M200 Apricot Achat Special Edition Fountain pen about two months ago. (Pelikan comes out with a cool color and matching ink about every year. That leads me to buy a new pen accordingly. Writing with a fountain pen is important to me. It's my semiotic way of saying 'words matter.' So I have an array of Pelikans, even though I do 98.7659-percent of my writing in a keyboard first-manner.)

Buying the pen took me two months of perseveration. That's what I mean about thinking before I spend. I'm not impecunious, just careful.

However, twice a year or so I spend like a drunken sailor on shore leave.

That is whenever the great publisher Taschen has their twice-annual book sale. As you can see from the order above and a stray receipt from a year ago, Taschen's books are interesting and their sale-prices teeter on the incredible. The truth is, I barely have time to even flip through the thousands of pages and pictures and volumes I buy. But that isn't the point. I read somewhere that the great writer Umberto Eco had a personal library of 30,000 books. Reading one book a day, it would have taken him 82 years to go through them all.

What we've forgotten in our everything-at-our-fingertips overly-pixelized age, is the value of things that are built to endure. We ignore things made with thousands of hours of painstakingness, erasures and perseveration. We have defaulted to the quick and the dead. Things that have the intended longevity of a fart in a windstorm.

The care and tactility you can get from a book versus a digital representation is the difference between corporeal passion and online porn.

This Taschen volume, which is heavier than my three-year-old grandson sits near me now. It is oversized like the old Manhattan yellow-pages and is therefore hard to read and unwieldy. It's the book equivalent of a crowded Lexington line man-spreader.

But.

The feel of the paper. The expanse of the perfect photographs. The transportative power of large imagery, not something silently flickering on your phone is all-too-seldom experienced these days.

It occurs to me as I write this that there is a larger, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny thought here.

We gave up something when we gave up physicality. When we made messages for media that had weight and dimension, not merely domesticated electrons. We don't, and here's my point, treat our work or our viewers with as much respect as in times past because our work is transitory--even illusory--from the get-go.

We're not, as people or an industry, going to return to paper and ink or celluloid of course. In fact, we are moving past any sort of corporealness of images, production or message as we further and further embrace AI.

But, at the very end of the day (or our days) the pith of our work isn't a new software, or fragrance, or mayonnaise or SUV, it's a human touch, a sense of contact, maybe a caress.

Things that are growing rarer all-over.

Things that are too precious to lose without lament. 

Or a fight.