I was in Michigan last month on vacation with some of my siblings and their families. I am not a huge beach fan, but I enjoyed the peaceful pace. I marveled that I seemed to be getting a suntan. I've heard of this kind of thing happening to other people, but I don't recall ever having one. Even when I was a kid spending all day outdoors, I mainly burned. So a tan was a novel prospect. But I noticed that my “tan” was not the smooth toast color I had long coveted, but more of a blotchy orange, like carelessly applied self-tanner.

　　Calling upon skills honed during a youth spent poring over the case files of Nancy Drew and Encyclopedia Brown, I mentally reviewed Clue No. 1, a note on the washer and dryer in the rented house: “Do not wash whites. They will get rust stains.” Clue No. 2: Hideous iron stains in the toilet bowl. In my fuzzy waking hours, I was fooled every morning: “Oh my God! What the heck is that? Do I have some terrible kidney disease? Oh, wait, the toilet bowl always looks like that.”

　　The water from the faucets, in addition to having a sulfurous stink, was slowly turning me a shade of Oompa Loompa orange. Thankfully, the massive pink welts from all of my bug bites gradually displaced the iron stains on my appendages.

　　After solving the Case of the Sham Tan, I had a lot of time to contemplate the power of print. Everyone in my family brought books or other reading material to the beach. My brother-in-law is a CFO, so I wasn't surprised to see his Sudoku book. My sister-in-law had a thick collection of crossword puzzles. My older brother had everything from paperback detective novels to a hardcover history of Wall Street. My youngest nephew had a big pile of “Archie Double Digests,” while my older nieces had various “Harry Potter” volumes and a couple of People magazines.

　　On the other hand, my 11-year-old nephew and most of the adults brought their laptops with them on vacation. But nobody took his or her machine to the beach. And, although some Web surfing was going on at the house, all of the adults were keen to read the morning papers (probably because we could linger over them with endless cups of coffee, something we can't do at home).

　　As my vacation progressed, I saw that print is much more than a basic communication or entertainment vehicle. It is a valuable self-defense tool, too. Have you ever woken from a sound sleep and killed a sparrow-sized horsefly with a rolled up laptop? Thank goodness for that handy copy of TimeOut Chicago!

　　Print also can be incendiary, as I learned when I watched my brother Jim start a bonfire on the beach with the Detroit Free Press. You can't do that with your Amazon Kindle!

　　A hard habit to break

　　At a recent conference for magazine publishers and editors, the keynote speaker addressed the Internet as a communications vehicle. He warmed to his topic, urging us to transform our thinking from print to online, to break our old print habits. Old habits apparently die hard: Each attendee had been given a copy of the speaker's book as well as a printed agenda.

　　“We are all hoping the habit will continue,” writes John G. Henry of Metalcraft (Mason City, IA). “Our company produces labels and name-plates, and has been producing RFID-enabled labels and hang tags for several years. It is very rare to get a job for RFID in which the customer is willing to not have either a barcode or human-readable number that corresponds to the RFID-encoded information. This [might suggest a distrust of the] new technology, but in some cases, where RFID readers are not present, people must read the labels. Doing custom printing on a durable label is our bread and butter.”

　　Henry's letterpress book printing hobby also unites old technology with the new. “I use handset and Ludlow for some, but I also use that new-fangled photopolymer stuff on my century-old presses.” Henry's Cedar Creek press operates from the chapel of an old convent, which also is his family's home.