We were sitting by the fireplace and staring into the fire. “I cannot imagine reading a book by the fireplace,” my beloved said out of the blue. “Indeed,” I said, “there is no book that can match a good fire.” That was three days ago, but I am still ruminating about our interchange. Many a black-and-white photograph from the end of the Nineteenth and the beginning of the Twentieth Century comes to my mind. The best I can say so many days after our brief interchange is that neither books nor fires are the same nowadays. Both have changed a lot over a single century.