Martin Hopkinson’s Ex Libris: The Art of Bookplates opens with a Timothy Cole bookplate from 1913. Designed for Herman Theodore Radin, it depicts a room overflowing with books—books on shelves and books on tables. Books propped up against a skull and sitting on a chair.  Additionally, the bookplate includes a quote (credited to Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, a physician who was also an author): “Show me the books he loves and I shall know / The man far better than through mortal friends”.

In the debates, discussions, conversations, and quarrels I have had with friends about the various merits of print books and e-books, this same point keeps coming around. Readers love to ponder and peruse other readers’ bookshelves. And this is just something that can’t be replicated with a Kindle or Nook. Books—real, print, physical books—say something about their owners and so, as the book Ex Libris makes clear, do bookplates.

MIAMI — “Vanishing stores are sad way to close book,” read one headline. “The last days of once upon a time,” said another.

Last month’s news that the giant Borders bookstore chain had collapsed, taking 400 stores and 11,000 employees with it, leaving behind only a couple of hundred millions of dollars in IOUs to publishers, was for many the seventh sign of an impending apocalypse: for bookstores, for the art of reading, for the very concept of literacy.

But rather than the first steps of a funeral cortege, the death of Borders is really just the first little dip on a wildly careening roller coaster ride for the people who write, publish, buy and sell books. It’s going to shake us up, down and sideways, industry figures say, and some people may get thrown from their cars. But one group is sure to be happy at the end: readers.

Ah, the ‘70s and ‘80s. Or, strictly speaking, the mid-‘70s through approximately 1992.

But then, this was no time to be pedantic. This was the time when the survivors of the hard-nosed ‘50s and taboo-shattering ‘60s settled down to consolidate their gains – and proceeded to blow it all on the biggest, loudest, most over-the-top party Western civilization had ever seen. Yes, even greater than the Roaring Twenties. Did they have Atari back then? Did they? Huh?

They settled down, had some offspring, and bought minivans – that being the only vehicle that would hold all the offspring’s stuff. This (the offspring that is, not the minivan) is the origin story of Generation X. And thus this is their unique dilemma today, some 40 years later, as they begin to settle back and think about consolidation in their turn… and find themselves contemplating the shortcomings of “Greed is good!” as a noble contribution to societal advancement, never mind source of cool stories to tell the grandkids.

Captain Easy, square-jawed and two-fisted devil-may-care man of action, resembles Clark Kent and acts like Indiana Jones. He was created by Roy Crane in Wash Tubbs, which comics historians have pegged as the first daily adventure strip.

Its little bespectacled hero began his humorous exploits in 1924 and met Captain Easy in 1929. The captain was imprisoned in the catacombs of a castle while “revolution rages in Kandelabra”. The friendly, easy-going brawler with sang-froid soon spun off into his own Sunday strip.

For an author who has arguably made much of his career out of answering queries that you didn’t know you wanted answers to (how important was salt to the development of human civilization?), Mark Kurlansky has some nerve positing an entire book as one long inquiry. Granted, What? isn’t exactly a tome, at 96 pages it’s the nonfiction equivalent of a novella – the tomette. As macro in focus as his earlier works of nonfiction were monuments of specificity, What? is pleasurable and gamelike, toying with the reader right from the subtitle: Are These the 20 Most Important Questions in Human History – Or Is This a Game of 20 Questions? It doesn’t give anything away to say that question’s not answered.

In 20 short chapters, each focused around a specific interrogative, Kurlansky goes from the obvious journalistic big ones (“How?” “Why?” “What?”) to formulations that appear dashed off at first blush (“What Do We Hate About Children?” “Brooklyn?”) but on further reflection seem more thoughtful, if only slightly – and the answers to those last two, by the way, are: they ask endless questions, and Walt Whitman’s fundamental curiousity.