You follow him to auctions and university collections, where he pores over forgotten and prized documents, illegible handwriting, and considers the contexts in which these letters were written. Each chapter tackles a certain aspect, era, or phenomenon of the letter writing world. Garfield’s words engage you, draw pictures of the characters involved, and provide humorous asides in footnotes as well as the regular text. The book traces the history of letters and postal systems, but not in the tone of a stuffy history professor. To the Letter is a history of letter writing that travels all the way back to the Roman empire - first by telling the story of a batch of letters written on flimsy wooden slices that were uncovered in the mud during an excavation in Vindolanda (the former location of a Roman fort in Britain) in the 1970s. We’re not so special someone else has almost certainly been there first.” “They expose a grand truth, and often the same truth we may feel when we read Shakespeare and Austen: no matter how original we consider ourselves to be, it is evident that our emotions, motives and desires have echoes in the past. A book recommendation, straight from the non-air conditioned apartment where I carry my fan around like a security blanket: To the Letter: A Celebration of the Lost Art of Letter Writing by Simon Garfield
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