Many wring their hands over the fate of the physical book, today’s threats to literary culture, but who remembers the various and sundry dangers posed to our libraries of yesteryear? Sheets of white paper pressed from wood pulp or cotton, printed with sequences of letters in neat and orderly lines, folded into signatures, bound at the spine with glue and thread, trimmed to a uniform shape, easily held in the hands of a human: a marvelous technology—and one under constant siege since the day of its invention. How easy it is to forget that in Iceland, while the island remained a colonial outpost, it was against the law until as late as 1897 for sagas to be recorded by any means other than the marks of sheep’s hooves on volcanic rocks. Few still living in East Anglia can recall the cheese-book years; the last Soviet manufacturer of people’s­ paeans-on-nail-heads, blind since 1972, passed away sometime in the late nineties in a decrepit home for old-age pensioners in Yakutsk; Barpo, the cult begun by Great-War draft dodgers escaped to Caphahas, Argentina, devoted both to millenarianism and the popularization of the secret flight-path novels of honeybees, went extinct decades ago from their refusal to either admit new members or procreate. Pope Xystus, a bitter and sadistic man, decreed not just that all memoirs be written about him, but that they be carved into the living flesh of heathens; the hopelessly sentimental Lord Babington devoted his life, and his vast fortune, to a campaign for the renaissance of the papyrus scroll, and went mad; Queen Elizabeth II, early in her reign, asked her subjects, in order to save paper for the war effort, to focus their literary efforts exclusively on cries of delight and praise at the end of a delicious meal. Nikola Tesla’s patented Electro-Flux Anecdote Oscillator went nowhere commercially, although repeatedly proven scientifically sound. The earliest draft of The Communist Manifesto, in a poorly conceptualized model of a new populist literature, was painstakingly built in one long line of bricks, laid out like Braille for giants, running across the Irish countryside from Belfast to Dublin. Our history books rarely document how the Westphalian Ink Crisis led to the mass memorization of villanelles, not to mention the Thirty Years War. France and Sweden have always refused to acknowledge their complicity in the Napoleonic Quilted Pantoum Imbroglio. And experts agree that the vibrating, fuzzy children’s books of today, although indeed deeply unsettling to those of us raised on bound volumes of paper and glue, is nothing compared to what is to come: semaphore renga; romans-à-­clef-on-demand; sublingual New Formalist sonnet sequences; short-story collections composed by robots spontaneously erupting, like plastic boils, on the ventral surfaces of portable telephones. The physical book will never die completely, but who among us can say for sure we will be the ones to preserve it?