Wine glasses ring from clanking on teeth as a couple asks for chocolate mousse with two spoons. I weigh the hors d’oeuvres on the beige cardstock in front of me, tracing with my finger in one perfectly straight line, like a comb parting hair. I fight the urge to manhandle the softly creased corners touched by so many hungry patrons. Should I go for my signature whipped ricotta or be unpredictable with a tarte flambée (I learned this is a fancy word for what is essentially flatbread)?
This is the kind of romantic monologue that I do not have when I’m scrolling through a menu on my phone.
Print is not dead. But it is sick.
The pandemic forced every restaurant to go touchless, replacing paper menus with QR codes so we could mull over our appetites on our own germ-infested phones. It made sense at the time, but now I sigh every time I settle into a chair and see the dreaded black and white square staring back at me.
And it’s not just menus. I am rarely presented a physical ticket to a sporting event, concert or theater production. Everyone is pushing audiobooks, which I tend to just tune out. Journalism is delivered not by paperboys but by pixels and codes. It takes years to run through a notebook with keyboards in the mix.
It’s all just dull.
With the renaissance of analog film and other “retro” things, the reawakening of print is falling into line. And I’m here for it.
I love seeing a blot of red wine (I guess it could technically be blood) in between the “appetizer” and “entrée” sections, a symptom of cabernet-induced laughter, a violent breakup, or just a clumsy person like me.
I love checking out a dog-eared novel from the library. I always make sure to read those pages with intense focus to discern whether my predecessor was marking a favorite passage or just caught off guard by some rice they forgot about on the stove, and folded the page in a fire-induced frenzy.
I love ripping open a birthday card garnished with sugary glitter that tumbles right onto the floor, messy cursive wishing me well for another year.
I love the little perforated tab on theater tickets, the date of the memory-to-be stamped in black ink, as if it knows you’ll want to remember it forever.
I even long for printed things I’ve never touched – like a magazine stand (seems like J.Crew hit the nostalgia button right on the nose with that one), a rolodex, even receiving printed documents at work (though maybe that’s not as romantic).
I did try print newspaper subscription for awhile, and to be honest I couldn’t keep up with it. There are pages and pages inked with amazing, in-depth content that my tiny brain can’t absorb. But I think if there was a more distilled version of the newspaper, if you could choose specific sections or how many articles you’d realistically read, I’d be into that.
Side note: if you want a newspaper that delivers once a month, with the prefect amount of content for busy brains, subscribe to The Goodnewspaper. It also makes a great gift.
Of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t bring up the environmental impact of printed things. There are certainly times when paper isn’t necessary, like an everyday purchase from a café or bodega. I have requested receipts in certain situations, like after my friend and I went to a restaurant specifically for the restaurant week deal on the steak, and their grill broke so we had to get coq au vin. Still one of the best meals I ever had. But typically, I just say, “no receipt, thanks.”
I was surprised to learn that print isn’t inherently worse for the environment than digital.
When we look at newspaper, your carbon footprint depends on how much time you spend on the daily headlines. One study by the KTH Center for Sustainable Communications looked specifically at reading the news in print, on a computer, and on an e-reader. Here’s what they found:
If you’re an avid reader who spends more than 30 minutes a day reading the news, the print edition results in a lower environmental impact than reading online (28 kilograms of CO2 per year, per person for print versus 35 kilograms per year, per person for online reading).
I would imagine that menus don’t have a large carbon footprint relative to their digital counterparts either, unless you’re talking about a The Bear style restaurant where the menu is revised daily. While they are made from paper (which may or may not be recycled), digital menus are not without emissions. According to Climate Impact Partners, the average website produces 1.76 grams of CO per page view.
I can’t say for sure whether receipts, tickets or other printed items are better or worse than their digital cousins. Books are another complicated one — while book printing is the world's third-largest industrial greenhouse gas emitter, e-readers are manufactured with fossil-fuel-derived plastics and making the batteries requires resource-heavy mining.
Essentially, it’s always complicated. Just because we don’t see smog coming out of our devices doesn’t mean they’re not polluting every time we power them up.
Anyway, this wasn’t supposed to be a serious conversation. I just like printed stuff. I wanna hold it in my hand. How do you feel about it?
Holding a piece of print media truly makes it feel its own, whereas digital media almost gives a sense of being just another “thing” on my phone/laptop. It’s still the same, yes, but not as personal to itself, I suppose.
I love printed media. It heightens the experience. It’s a human extension of touch. Stamped passports, handwritten pages, magazines, it carries a different kind of intimacy.