Paper: An Elegy - Hardcover

Sansom, Ian

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0007480261 ISBN 13: 9780007480265

Publisher: Fourth Estate, 2012

Synopsis

Table of contents, introduction, acknowledgments, bibliography, illustration credits. Black and white illustrations. A history of the "forms and functions" of paper. xxiv, 230, 2 pages. paper-covered boards, dust jacket. 8vo..

About this title

From the Back Cover:

Let us suppose for a moment that paper were to disappear.

Would anything be lost?

Everything would be lost.

aper 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.

About the Author:

Ian Sansom is a frequent contributor and critic for The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The London Review of Books, and The Spectator and a regular broadcaster on BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4. He is the author of nine books including Paper: An Elegy, and the Mobile Library Series.

About this edition

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0007480261
• ISBN 13: 9780007480265
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 224