Start the presses! The e-book is losing ground and printed books (especially hardbacks) are proving their resilience according to the Wall Street Journal.

This news vindicates my late-adopter-Luddite tendencies (it’s true I have no Kindle or other e-reader) and makes me feel smugly hopeful that all those little bookshops that have hung in there in the face of the e-book invasion will bloom again.

In my wilder dreams, the 200 libraries that closed in the UK in 2012 will also rise from the digital trash.

I recently wrote the poem “Cataloguing Books”, which reveals just how technologically pernickety I can be and celebrates the printed book for its ease and tactile pleasure.

Cataloguing Books

Strange to hear you mouthing the names of poets I’ve loved for a lifetime.

Almost like poems, you read their names and state their book titles and, after each has been clearly enunciated, a mechanical noise signals that the contact has been made and the work is done.

Books — or at least their details — are piling up in this electronic storehouse but it’s a catalogue that can’t capture the hours I’ve spent in bookshops thumbing titles, smelling pages, fingering spines and wandering aisles.

In libraries, too, I’ve never been shushed, as their volumes always lure me to silently divine the messages in their midst — pointing me to a new author to read or a quote to scrawl in my journal.

**

“You can scroll through the entries I’ve made at any time,” you say.

“And look! Try to find one of your books. It’s easy.”

I refuse the mobile phone in your hand and resist your desire for me to stroke its screen and little app.

Instead, I walk to the bookshelves and pull out a hardback.

“Found it,” I say. “It’s been here, like a lover, all along.”