Paper: An Elegy

Description

A witty, personal and entertaining reflection on the history and meaning of paper during the (passing) era of its universal importance. Let us suppose for a moment that paper were to disappear. Would anything be lost? Everything would be lost. Paper is the technology through which and with which we have made sense of the world. The making of paper and the manifold uses of paper have made our civilization what it is. But the age of paper is coming to an end. In 2010, Amazon announced for the first time that it was selling more e-books than paper books: according to some, the paper book has no more than five years before it becomes extinct. E-tickets replace tickets. Archives are digitised. The world we know was made from paper, and yet everywhere we look, paper is beginning to disappear. In 'Paper: An Elegy' Ian Sansom curates a history of paper, in all its forms and functions. Both a cultural study and a series of personal reflections on the meaning of paper, this book is a timely meditation on the very paper it's printed on. As we enter a world beyond paper, Sansom explores the paradoxes of paper - its vulnerability and its durability - and shows how some kinds of paper will always be with us.

Ian Sansom is the author of Paper: An Elegy and the Mobile Library Mystery series of novels. He is also a frequent contributor to the Guardian and the London Review of Books, and a regular broadcaster on BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4. The Sussex Murders is the fifth in his County Guide series, following The Norfolk Mystery, Death in Devon, Westmorland Alone and Essex Poison.

'Engaging and dynamic' Andrew Martin, Financial Times 'Wonderfully diverting...Splendidly dense with fact and thought' Steven Poole, Times Literary Supplement 'Sansom's scholarship is prodigious; his enthusiasm inexhaustible...He can make one laugh out loud by his placing of a single word' Daily Telegraph 'A collection of ever so erudite, witty, chucklesome essays, rich with digressions and asides, on paper, in many of its guises, that seeks to refute - and does refute - the idea that we are moving towards a paperless world' Bookmunch