Ian Sansom, author of Paper: An Elegy which went on sale yesterday, has very nicely stopped by to guest blog. In an age where digitization can seem relentless, it's good to be reminded just how important paper is.
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For the past few years I have been writing a series of novels about a librarian, The Mobile Library series (published by Harper Perennial). My new non-fiction book – Paper: An Elegy – is a history of paper. I guess there’s probably a theme emerging here, to do with books, and the power of books, and the beauty and meaning of books as objects and as things. I suppose I’m just a bookish kind of a person. I am also a paper person.
Paper: An Elegy is my attempt to study and understand the world’s most ubiquitous and versatile man-made material in all of its many forms and guises, from bank cheques and ledgers, to banners and bunting, and board games, and book marks, and business cards, and cartons and packaging, and menus, and cigarette papers, and paper clothes, and paper coffins, and confetti, and coupons and tickets, and election ballot papers, and greeting cards and post cards, and identity cards and passports, and magazines, catalogues, newspapers, maps, stamps, posters, wallpaper, wrapping paper … And so on and so on. And books.
Paper: An Elegy is a book about books, but it’s not only about books. It’s also a book about how our economy, our art, our wars and our attempts to make peace have all been conducted by means of paper. As soon as we’re born, paper attaches itself to us and becomes a kind of artificial skin. And when we die, what survives of us are those same sheets and tatters. Everything we are and everything we have been is paper.
And yet this most ubiquitous of products is so familiar, so ordinary and so obvious that we have failed to recognise its significance – it remains an artifact almost without an official history. Paper: An Elegy is a small attempt to provide that history, or at least a part of that history – it is a history of paper that attempts to show how and why humans became attached to paper and how in turn it became engrafted into our very being.
As we enter a world beyond paper, paper nonetheless remains the ghost in the machine. As we abandon paper as an object, so simultaneously we embrace technologies that resemble it and remind us of its continuing presence: the iPad as a jotter; the Kindle as a book; the mobile phone a pocket diary.
Paper: An Elegy is partly a technological and material history, but it is also a history of symbols and ideas, an account of how paper became sacred and special, and of how a thing that might simultaneously be priceless and also a matter of mere waste came to define our lives and our history. It is the story of The Age of Paper.
I do hope you enjoy the book. It’s called an elegy. But it is also a celebration.
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Thank you, Ian!
– Annie