Historians of the book — a new and growing tribe — read books as scouts read trails.
We wended our way down to a sidewalk alongside the Long Island Expressway and, ignoring a sign that read "Trail Closed," went a few yards farther and found a rough trail leading into the woodland's interior.
The Loyalist Parkway, also known as Highway 33, runs from one end of the county to the other, and through all the main towns – Wellington and Bloomfield are particularly rich with galleries – but keep your eye open for signs reading Arts Trail or Taste Trail.
And I certainly hadn't thought about him in the context of Philadelphia in the 1980s, until I started reading "Paper Trails," a collection of Dexter's journalism published over the years in outlets including The Philadelphia Daily News, The Sacramento Bee, Esquire and Sports Illustrated.
He was reading a trail for Archive on 4 when he stumbled over his words just before 8pm on 18 August.
(Thanks to his father, Roy, they had been reading his trail journal at www.royrobinson.homestead.com and his journey has been widely covered in the hiking press).
But the larger picture painted by today's statistics is hard to miss: Media is embedded in children's lives and dominating hours of their days, while reading is trailing behind.
Objectors, on the flipside, usually talk about the damage done to "the experience of reading," a trail of argument that plunges "into realms of hazy phenomenology," in the words of Lev Grossman, bestselling author and tech commentator.
Even though I knew the nearest town wasn't more than a few miles away, the terrain seemed empty enough to get lost in, and I was reminded of a time in the New Mexico desert when I'd read a trail map wrong and found myself walking in circles.
The remaining challenge is to develop analysis methods that will most effectively read the trail left by published "significant" results.
