Paper: An Elegy

by Ian Sansom

Overview

From the author of The Bad Book Affair comes a witty, personal, and entertaining meditation on the history and significance of paper—an international cultural study and a series of personal reflections on the meaning of this essential product.

Let us suppose for a moment that paper were to disappear. Would anything be lost? Everything would be lost.

Paper surrounds us. Not only as books, letters and diaries, but as beer mats and birth certificates, board games and business cards, fireworks and flypaper, photographs and playing cards, tickets and tea bags. We are paper people.

But the age of paper is coming to an end. E-books regularly outsell physical books. E-tickets replace the paper variety. Archives are digitized. The world we know was made from paper, and yet everywhere we look, paper is beginning to disappear. As we enter a world beyond paper, Ian Sansom explores the paradoxes of the greatest of man-made materials and shows how some kinds of paper, and the ghosts and shadows of paper, will always be with us.

Paper: An Elegy is 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 is printed on.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062295613
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	05/14/2013
Sold by:	HARPERCOLLINS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	11 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Ian Sansom is the author of 10 books of fiction and non-fiction. He is a former Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge and a former Writer-in-Residence at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry in Belfast. He is currently a Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. He is a regular broadcaster on BBC Radio 4 and Radio 3 and he writes for The Guardian and The London Review of Books.

Table of Contents

Respecting Paper: An Introduction xi

1 A Miracle of Inscrutable Intricacy 1

2 In the Wood 17

3 Walking Papers 31

4 Victims to the BIBLIOMANIA! 45

5 Ornamenting the Facade of Hell 59

6 The Soul of Advertisement 77

7 Constructive Thinking 95

8 The Secret Is the Paper 115

9 The Squiggle Game 129

10 A Wonderful Mental and Physical Therapy 147

11 Legitimationspapiere 167

12 Five Leaves Left 185

The Hollow in the Paper: Acknowledgments 214

Tearing the Book into Pieces: A Bibliography 216

Editorial Reviews

With a playfulness that begins with the title, this “elegy” to paper is instead a celebration of its essential, ubiquitous role in society, culture and life itself....[PAPER is] An enjoyable argument that speaks to the paper lover in all of us.” — Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

With a playfulness that begins with the title, this "elegy" to paper is instead a celebration of its essential, ubiquitous role in society, culture and life itself. A surface reading of modernity suggests that we are on the verge of a "paperless" society, as everything from bills to books goes digital. Not so, writes Sansom, a British journalist, broadcaster and mystery writer (The Bad Book Affair, 2010), who writes, "As this book will attempt to show…reports of the death of paper have been greatly exaggerated." In chapters that encompass everything from treaties to toilet paper, from passports to wallpaper to origami, the author shows how paper remains central within our collective consciousness, how even when we move our eyes to an e-reader or computer screen, we will see page numbers for the cyberpages that we "turn" or an on-screen wastebasket for the documents we wish to delete. "We are, simply, paper fanatics and paper fundamentalists." While skipping across centuries and continents through prose that combines scholarly research and conversational engagement, Sansom insists that "this book is not, strictly speaking, a history of paper. It is, rather, a kind of personally curated Paper Museum." He explores the significant role paper has played in the lives of Dickens and da Vinci and suggests that Hans Christian Andersen was perhaps even more "extraordinary" as a paper cutter than as a storyteller. He writes of forgery and collage and of the paper trail that documents our lives from birth to death, and he writes with an intimacy that paper makes possible: "Paper's most powerful magic? Simply this. That paper allows us to be present--or to appear to be present--when we are in fact absent. It both breaks and bridges time and distance. I am talking to you now, for example, on paper." An enjoyable argument that speaks to the paper lover in all of us.

Kirkus Reviews