View from the North 40: Would you run through fire for it?

When I was a wee small human, among my prized family possessions were an impressive 6-inch thick Webster’s dictionary and the full, multi-volume faux-leather bound Encyclopedia Britannica.

One day, after a second-grade class lesson on home safety, I pulled all these books out and stacked them into manageable piles, so that I could determine how many trips it would take me to save all that information from a fire. Six. It would’ve taken six trips. Still, rescuing those books was included in my personal home fire emergency plan.

I was born in those awkward years after the Gutenberg prin...