December 7, 2012 6:06 pm
How we read
As the world of print recedes, what is lost and what is gained?
Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times, by Andrew Piper,University of Chicago Press RRP$22.50/RRP£14.50, 208 pages
Paper: An Elegy, by Ian Sansom, Fourth Estate RRP£14.99, 224 pages
The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting and Why It Still Matters, by Philip Hensher, Macmillan RRP£14.99/Faber RRP$28, 304 pages
Sansom invokes a vast amount of literature; fortunately he has a great taste in quotes. He cites a Herman Melville short story in which a typically vast and whitewashed paper mill resembles “an arrested avalanche”. In an article on bill-sticking, Dickens referred to an old warehouse, so plastered with rotting posters and paste that it had been “brought down to the condition of an old cheese”. Staying with literature (just about) we learn that 2.5m pulped Mills & Boon novels were used for the top level of asphalt on the M6 in 2003. But Sansom’s frenetic and amusing paper chase also extends to labels, tickets, wrapping paper, paper money, posters, paper art, and there is quite a lot of disgusting stuff about toilet paper, “the fastest-growing sector in paper production”.
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