PAPER LOVE

‘I stepped into the bookshop and breathed in that perfume of paper and magic that strangely no one had ever thought of bottling,’ writes Carlos Ruiz Zafón in The Angel’s Game. The novel is about a return to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books in Barcelona. It’s a thriller. It made me wonder what would happen if in a thousand years’ time someone did an excavation and came upon a forgotten library. Would they also experience the magical power of paper and ink?

Imagine their world without paper. A clinical, advanced, technological lifestyle with no bookshelves on which The Little Prince, A Tale of Two Cities and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe could stand side by side.

The heaps of magazines next to my bed become sparser year by year. My coffee table these days no longer boasts a folded newspaper.

It feels like the death of a loved one.

In the eighties, Beeld’s office was still in Voorhout Street, New Doornfontein. There was nothing quite as exciting for me as the sound of the old Heidelberg press thrumming to life in the basement in the late afternoon, ready to start the printing of the newspaper.

Sometimes, when we printed a new supplement, Tony Viterbo, the composing room foreman, would come running up from downstairs and put one of the first copies in front of me. I can almost feel the dampness of the freshly printed newspaper. I still smell the ink. We lived for every day’s burst