This book is an utter delight. I read it in five sittings, over weekday breakfasts of coffee and toast. I tried to keep my fingers clean as I turned the pages. Paper: An Elegy is a thing of beauty: a cultural history of paper, thoughtfully crafted (Sansom connects sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph, chapter to chapter – seemingly an obvious aspect of the craft of writing, but not one I come across as frequently as you might think), and bound into a gorgeous material object. From the red hardback cover, the embossed jacket (emblazoned with a glorious variety of roman, bold and italicised typefaces), and the quality of the paper (relished with the turn of every page), to the reproductions of labels, maps, woodcuts, posters, diagrams, wallpapers and photographs of origami dragons, Paper: An Elegy is a book fetishist’s wet dream.
It is a love song to our paper world: its delights and curiosities, its utility and embellishment, its durability and fragility, its inventiveness and simplicity. Sansom offers us a history of paper’s playful and practical value to celebrate this simple material’s sheer variety. Deleuze, Sansom tells us, imagines a way of ‘reading with love’. But Sansom goes one better: writing with love about the material upon which his life – and ours – is built.
