Printing for Tomorrow’s Communal Memory

If a community were to look back a hundred years from now, what traces of our care, struggle, and imagination would they find in the books we leave behind?

When a hundred years pass, what will remain of us?

Perhaps it won’t be the noise of our present timelines, nor the fleeting posts we scatter daily across digital walls. Memory has its own way of choosing what stays and what fades. What lasts, often, are those gestures of care that communities decided were worth recording — the stories written down, the poems whispered into pages, the books carried across generations.

In many indigenous traditions, memory was not just personal but communal. The chants of the elders, the weaving of genealogies, the myths tied to the land — all these were ways of saying: this is who we are, and this is how we remember. To forget was not simply to lose information, but to risk losing a piece of identity.

Today, we live in a paradox. We generate more “content” than ever before, yet so much of it is untethered, unkept. We scroll, we consume, we move on. And so the question lingers: what are we truly leaving behind for the future to hold onto?

Printing, in its quiet endurance, resists this forgetting. A printed book is slow, tangible, stubborn in its presence. It insists on being held, on being passed on. Unlike the endless stream of updates, a book asks for pause. And in that pause, memory is given a chance to root.

What if we thought of printing not merely as production, but as planting? Every book as a seed of communal memory, meant to germinate decades later when someone — a grandchild, a student, a wanderer — pulls it from a shelf and feels a flicker of recognition: They too cared. They too dreamed. They too struggled with this.

To print today is to gamble with tomorrow. Not in the sense of profit or loss, but in the wager that the traces of our collective imagination are worth preserving. That long after we are gone, someone may still find in these pages a map of our longings, a record of our resilience.

So perhaps the work before us is simple, though not small: to keep tending these seeds. To print not just for now, but for later. To honor the truth that memory is not only about the past — it is also a gift we prepare for those who will one day ask, what did they leave us?

And maybe, if we do it with care, the answer will be: enough to remember, enough to continue.