Paper: An Elegy
(Paperback)
Publishing Details
Paper: An Elegy
By (Author) Ian Sansom
HarperCollins Publishers
Fourth Estate Ltd
7th November 2013
United Kingdom
Classifications
General
Non Fiction
Material culture
Paper and pulp manufacture and processing
Publishing and book trade
Archiving, preservation and digitization
Antiques, vintage and collectables: books, manuscripts, ephemera and printed mat
Materials science
History of Computing, digital and information technologies
Literary essays
676
Physical Properties
Paperback
224
Width 129mm, Height 198mm, Spine 18mm
210g
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 its 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.
Reviews
Engaging and dynamic Andrew Martin, Financial Times
Wonderfully divertingSplendidly dense with fact and thought Steven Poole, Times Literary Supplement
Sansoms scholarship is prodigious; his enthusiasm inexhaustibleHe 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
Author Bio
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.
