I harbor a fond nostalgia for the technologies of my youth. I keep six or seven old typewriters in my office, long after I typed the last word on any of them. In one closet I store an old-fashioned slide projector. And a turntable that will play 78s. A box camera that shoots film. A View-Master.

And from one generation further back, a stereoscope and a couple of kerosene lanterns. That sort of thing.

But mostly I have a lot of books. None of them is particularly rare or valuable, although some are so old that the cover price is 95 cents.

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In fact, I’m not a book collector. My bulky printed database is an incidental accumulation born of decades of reading and a mild hoarding instinct.

These paragraphs probably peg me as a citizen of a certain age who is wistfully considering the twilight of a 500-year-old technology — the printed book — in the face of the efficient, logical digitization of text in the form of e-books.

Well sort, of. But an interesting report in the New York Times last week suggests that news of the death of the printed book may be premature.

If you care about print, a few years ago things looked bad. Between 2008 and 2010, e-book sales exploded by 1,260 percent, and when Borders booksellers declared bankruptcy, bookstores and publishers of printed books across the country were looking nervously over their shoulders.

But, the Times reports, signs indicate that some readers of e-books are returning to print. During the first five months of 2015, e-book sales fell by 10 percent. And the American Booksellers Association lists 2,227 bookstore locations in 2015, up from 1,660 five years ago. At BookPeople, in Austin, Texas, sales are up 11 percent over last year, making 2015 the store’s most profitable year since its founding in 1970.

These figures may represent a minor, temporary ebb in the once seemingly inevitable flow that will sweep the printed book into the past, along with the anachronistic technologies I mention above. But I hope not.

E-readers have their virtues, of course. You can read them in the dark. You can adjust the font. And when you come across a word that you don’t know, you can access a dictionary with a touch.

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And they’re remarkably efficient: you can download and store hundreds of books in a device smaller than a printed copy of “Billy Budd.”

Still, the physicality of a printed book has virtues and pleasures that e-readers can’t embody. Each printed book is a work of art, or — not to overstate it — at least an artifact, designed by someone down to the last detail of cover art and font. Every book invites the potential reader to pick it up, heft it, flip it over and fan through the pages.

Maybe even admire it.

Individually, each book is an object that rewards consideration, even before you get to the text. Put enough of them together and they become furniture, but in the best sense of the term.

While an e-reader can hold volumes, even a small library of printed books represents hundreds of pounds of impedimenta that turns moving day into a burdensome undertaking.

Still, nearly every book on the shelves that surround me _ even the ones that haven’t been opened for decades — not only tells a story, but has a story, evoking a period of time, an event, a person, an insight that can be recalled merely by observing the art on a book’s spine.

Reading printed books provides other subtle pleasures, as well. I like the analogous shift in weight from your right hand to your left as you progress through a book. Or the satisfaction of hefting a really substantial, just-finished novel by, say, Charles Dickens.

E-books versus print? The jury’s still out. But there’s some evidence that the physical pleasures of the printed book may persist for a while. Just because a really fine technology can be replaced by another, doesn’t mean that it should be.

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