Paper: An Elegy
By Ian Sansom
3.5/5
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About this ebook
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.
Ian Sansom
Ian Sansom is the author of the Mobile Library and County Guides series of novels. He writes for the Guardian, the TLS, and the Spectator and is a regular broadcaster on BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4. He lives in County Down.
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Reviews for Paper
27 ratings6 reviews
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5This is an easy read with some interesting stuff, though perhaps not enough to make it a good book. As the author says, it's not quite a history.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This is a history of paper. Not just paper, including how its made (pretty much the same as it has been for hundreds of years, except now by machines instead of by hand), but it also looks at the histories of various items made with paper: books, games and puzzles, origami, art, and more. The intro started off really interesting, also taking us through a day without paper. The rest of the book – though it had some interesting tidbits -- just wasn’t quite as good. There was a lot of references to literature and art, and that kind of lost my interest there. Overall, though, I’m rating it “ok”, but I feel like that might be a bit generous.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A delightful little book celebrating the material that is paper.
This is the type of book that the English do best, quirky, a single subject, and by someone with an obsession boarding on OCD!
It covers all sorts of subjects, from money to origami, it is a book that allows the author to describe his passion for this now ubiquitous material. There are lots of anecdotes and stories, and it is written in a pleasant style, with a moderate number of diagrams.
Great little book. If you liked Just My Type, you'll like this - Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5An amazing miscellany of paper facts, from making of paper to building things with paper. Along the way it covers the many ways paper is used including origami.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This is the sort of book my wife rolls her eyes at when I bring it home. "Really Ed, a book about paper?" Yes, a book about a paper. A fascinating and entertaining mix of cultural studies, history, and personal reflection on the indispensableness of paper.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Having just finished Nicholas Basbanes' On Paper I decided to just grab this one next, just to stay on the topic ... it also happened to be next on the pile of Books to Read Soon(ish). There are some key similarities between the books, other than the fact that they both take paper as their subject: Sansom's approach too is a bit scattershot, but he notes this explicitly, calling his book not a history of paper but a "kind of personally curated Paper Museum." Jumping from theme to theme with each short chapter, using only the versatility and ubiquity of paper as his organizing principle, Sansom's book is a breezy romp, with much of the trivia but rather less of the scholarship than can be found in Basbanes' work.While some of the paper-based topics (origami, money, books) that Basbanes discusses also figure here, Sansom takes a few different directions, with sections on paper-based toys and games (cards, board games, paper dolls, puzzles), advertisements, and the whole "paperless office" silliness making appearances.Fine for the very casual reader, but you may find that you want much more than Sansom offers.