Furniture makers say they are making and selling fewer bookcases, and many people believe they will soon be artifacts of a different time. It isn’t that people are not reading, they are reading more than ever, and paying less and less to do it. It is in many ways the golden age of reading, even if much of it comes in different forms.

I love bookcases and am drawn to photograph them, not because I mourn the good old days but because they were so much a part of my life, and I see them now as part of my cultural memory, my history and imagination. I took this photo in an upstate New York antiquities store. I was drawn to them as a kind of memory, I don’t think generations of the future will have books and store them in this way.