I was reading The New York Times on the bus from the Palmer avenue lot to Woods Hole to take the ferry to the Vineyard when the woman sitting next to me profiled me and said something about my being a New Yorker. I responded to her smile, and said, “Yes, but I was a Brooklyn boy.” I then asked her how she knew I was from the Big Apple. She responded: “The way you fold your newspaper.” I guess she knew what she was talking about since she seemed to be in her 60s and was a real estate agent in New York city and the Vineyard. As we chatted, it hit me that just as analog television was on its last legs, I was practicing what may be on its way to a lost art.

Since I had just been to SUNY/Buffalo, an annual event for me, to participate in graduation ceremonies for the Graduate School of Education, in addition to my way of folding and reading The New York Times, I wondered about libraries, too. In SUNY/Buffalo’s north campus, the library has a large room that held all sorts of equipment for reading earlier newspapers and microfiche. All that equipment is gone and replaced, it seemed to me, by about 100 computers.

I am also an elected library trustee in Edgartown, where we are in the process of planning a new library to back onto our original 1904 Carnegie Library. Hence, I wondered what the inside of a library is starting to look like and would look like in say, 10 years.

Will there be fewer books on the shelves? Will you walk out of the library with a book on a disk, on your stick, or on an electronic book or whatever such an item will be called in a few years? Perhaps, rather than going to the library physically, you may download a book from the library via your home computer. Indeed, who knows what will replace our present iPhones, iPads, Kindles, Nooks or other technology platforms.

Despite automation, I figure libraries will be one of the few places left where local residents can go to participate in interactions with humans. Libraries are also a place where humans will mix with technology in all sorts of configurations. Indeed, if Ben Franklin, who was born in Boston and in Philadelphia organized the first free library in America, was around today, he would write positively about contemporary libraries in his Poor Richard’s Almanack. Since Franklin was a printer, scientist, and diplomat, I think he would look with delight at the way today’s libraries continue to serve people, regardless of their economic status, while keeping current with the appropriate mix of technology, information and entertainment. Of course, libraries will have to continue to wrestle with the ever-increasing generated information in making “stuff” available to users.

When I traveled from Brooklyn to Manhattan to attend high school, I rode the West End line to 34th street. Like everyone else, I learned how to fold The New York Times while holding on to the strap hanging from a bar. Anyone who was a subway straphanger will always know how to fold a large newspaper, which, by the way, is a great technique for reading a newspaper while sitting on the beach, riding a bus, or flying. On another positive point, I figure I could get onto the speaking circuit, again. This time, though, I would demonstrate that lost art of how my fellow and former World War II and World War I aged New York city subway straphangers used to fold a printed-on-paper newspaper.

Herb Foster lives in Edgartown, and is completing the manuscript for Ghetto to Ghetto: Yiddish and Jive in American Life.