Digital life might have seemed just perfect for a while, but paper is making a comeback

Caroline Buijs loves paper. She loves the slowness of it and the state of mind it puts her in. And she’s not the only one.

Digital life might have seemed just perfect for a while, but paper is making a comeback. And the great thing is that it’s taking on all kinds of new roles too. It gives a sense of peacefulness, helps you reflect and feels like a gift.

Paper as a powerful activist tool

Writing on paper helps you remember things, you learn better when using paper, and a simple white sheet can even become an activist tool.

As we saw in 2022 for example, when demonstrations were held against the drastic zero-COVID policy in several Chinese cities. Demonstrating in China is not easy, but the protesters found a way: by holding up blank sheets of regular white (printer) paper. These were, as writer Daan Heerma van Voss put it in Dutch newspaper NRC, ‘carried like shields’.

‘They know what they want to say, and the authorities know what they want to say, so there’s no need to say it,’ Xiao Qiang, a researcher on digital rights and Internet freedoms at the University of California, Berkeley, told The New York Times. ‘When you hold up a blank piece of paper, everyone knows what you mean.’ This is how a sheet of paper suddenly became a powerful response to oppression. ‘By saying nothing in the literal sense, you say everything in the figurative sense,’ Van Voss wrote. ‘You can’t be prosecuted for saying nothing.’

Illustrators love paper

Paper means different things to different people. I notice this each time I ask the illustrators who work on the Flow Book for Paper Lovers for their thoughts. For example, Cassandra Ott from Canada, wrote: ‘I love its tactile qualities and infinite possibilities. It has so much history and, even in this technological world, it’s still a beautiful and necessary addition to daily life.’

And illustrator Frann de Bruin states that, even though she works a lot digitally, ‘Drawing on paper feels precious and natural to me. The traditional interaction between the sheet of paper and a soft pencil is still my favorite; it has a special warmth to it.’

Carefully crafted illustrations are best seen and felt on paper, rather than flashing by on a screen. As illustrator Anna Boulogne points out in the Flow Book for Paper Lovers: ‘As I often work digitally, I love it when my illustrations come into their own on paper; it really shows them to their best advantage. Nothing beats  paper.’

A lot of indie magazines and zines

For me, the Athenaeum News Center and Bookstore on Spui and the Vlieger stationery store in my hometown of Amsterdam are both irresistible. I can never cycle past the Spui without stopping at the Athenaeum if their red-and-white-striped awning is rolled out (signifying they’re open). Not so much for the books, but for the special magazines they have from all over the world.

‘The audience that buys independent magazines is growing and also getting younger,’ says Marc Robbemond of Athenaeum News Center. Zines—self-published, low-circulation mini-magazines—are particularly popular. ‘We have a whole wall of them. Time and again, we see a new generation of young people buying a lot of magazines and zines, then making their own zine and bringing it to the store.’

The themes of the zines that Robbemond sells are very diverse: ‘From red hair and the whole community around it, to queer and gender, and from the Arab world to feminism. You see that these indie magazines are influencing the mainstream magazines again.’ Besides zines, notebooks are also selling well, both blank and themed—such as the six-minute diary or the one-line- a-day notebooks.

We are all saturated with the digital world and paper is a good escape from that

Printed textbooks are back; digitalization has gone too far

At secondary school, my kids used both physical and digital textbooks, but they always preferred the former. In 2023, schools in Sweden started reintroducing printed (reading- and text-) books into the classrooms again. Tablets and laptops are still used but are no longer the main teaching tools.

According to the Swedish Minister of Education, digitalization had gone too far. She points out that reading from paper enhances learning outcomes: it helps students understand, comprehend, remember and reflect on texts better. What’s more, it’s easier to become aware of connections when you learn from paper. It forces you to concentrate because there are no distractions from moving images and no links to click on.

Reading the newspaper in peace and quiet

Of course, I couldn’t—and wouldn’t—want to live without my laptop and tablet, but it’s so nice to use paper as well. I like that it gives me a quiet moment in my busy life. Whether I’m writing my morning pages in a notebook or jotting down my shopping list, wrapping a gift or compiling a letter to a friend, I always sit down and take my time. I love the slowness of paper and the state of mind it puts me in.

This sentiment of being able to focus without any distractions was also highlighted by readers of the Dutch NRC newspaper in early 2024 after the newspaper’s new editor-in-chief had stated in an interview that the paper version would cease to exist one day. A letter from a 32-year-old reader expressed exactly what I was thinking: ‘For years I myself have indeed read the newspaper on my smartphone, but recently I changed my mind. I now have a full paper subscription, which allows me to read the articles in peace and quiet. It is a very welcome change of pace in a world where we look at our screens all day. There are no notifications pestering me, and I no longer just halfheartedly read the article while also doing something else.’

Another reader wrote: ‘Let’s give our  eyes a rest every now and then. And yes, that really is best via paper.’

Paper can become something else

In London, there’s a beautiful store called Present & Correct. Located just a stone’s throw from the city’s oldest square, it houses a wide-ranging collection of stationery. When I ask the store’s founder, Neal Whittington, what paper means to him, he mails me: ‘For me it has always been a place for doodling, making lists and plans, and sketching. A blank sheet is never not exciting, never something ‘simple’.’

Whittington thinks paper feels like a gift because, ‘it’s such a tactile material. It has a lot of promise, it can be beautiful and functional. It can feel nostalgic and sentimental. There is a power to the forms that it comes in: books, posters, cards, drawings… I also love the tools that are used alongside it: pens, pencils, scissors, rulers, clips. All these things allow paper to become something else.’

Whittington doesn’t believe paper is replaceable. ‘We are all saturated with the digital world and I feel  that paper is a good escape from that,’ he writes. ‘I especially like old ephemera, things that are made to be impermanent—such as tags, tickets, envelopes, labels. Vintage ones are always the best and I love the massive variety that is out there.’

Busy bookstores

Back in Amsterdam, the Athenaeum News Center stands right next door its sister, the Athenaeum Bookstore, where bookseller Reny van der Kamp explains how young people in particular love beautifully published books. ‘They’re especially fond of books that are bound in a special way or where the pattern of the cover continues onto the spine.’ Van der Kamp recently participated in an exchange program where they worked for a few days in a bookstore in the UK. ‘I saw the same thing there that I see here: busy bookstores, full of people who cherish the paper book.’

Before leaving Athenaeum, I couldn’t resist treating myself to the book Modern Nature by the British writer and filmmaker Derek Jarman. The dust jacket has a belly band made of eco-friendly paper embedded with flower seeds. You can put the paper in some earth and the seeds will germinate. The first shoots are now peeping out of the soil in my pot at home. ‘Paper always marks the beginning of something,’ illustrator Léa le Pivert tells me. ‘It’s a blank canvas where anything can happen, whether it’s a piece of art, a love letter or a grocery shopping list.’ Or a flower seed belly band.

Are you a paper lover too?

The new Flow Book for Paper Lovers is full of paper goodies, such as writing paper, stickers, cards, wrapping paper, envelopes, notebooks and much more in all sorts of beautiful illustrations and designs.