Things can only get better

Do any of your books have wrinkled bottoms?

I have been thinking of having a VDU installed over the bath to staunch the flow of water up my lower margins. Then I thought, I don't want electricity near the bath. But of course they can be run on batteries now (the VDUs, not my lower margins).

So that's not such a daft idea after all. Maybe I could get one for the bed as well. It would be good to get rid of that tender spot in the middle of my chest, the result of years of resting the bottoms of spines there. And you could read without a light on. But could you fall asleep with a VDU on your chest? Could you read the machine on its side when you changed position?. You couldn't hold the top corner of the right- hand page for quick turning like a music score for pace and excitement. There wouldn't be that marvellous sense of cradling something companionable in your hands; something akin to the cat. Then there's the texture of the paper, and the crispness of the print, the ease of keeping up momentum by seeing where the chapter ends, the possibility of cheating by skipping ahead to see where the plot is going, the internal warmth that bindings seem to have. The sheer satisfaction of putting the book down, slightly more read. All those pleasures of the senses would be gone. And it would be no better in the old armchair.

Anyway, VDUs all over the place would be too expensive, thank god -- and ugly. So books are okay. Books have got a future. Maybe more research and encyclopaedia- type work will be done on line, but real reading, which is partly about lingering, about reverie, contemplation, the senses -- more than just the text --, reading will ensure that books survive.

But what about manuscripts? Poets, probably more than other writers, will stay loyal to pen and paper - for many of them the physical and sensual contacts between the two and the flow down the writing arm are all essential parts of the process. However, a lot of novelists and non-fiction authors are already nerds, well-versed in those parts of the wurlitzer they need, especially revision and correction. It has its downsides in making it easier to write longer books and there is no doubt that it has had a deleterious effect on the quality (and the denseness) of a lot of published work. Maybe there will be a market in hard-drives eventually so that researchers can unravel the trails of drafts within the machine (like audit-trails followed by the taxman -- beware!). But who wants a clean typescript for his collection? There will be some who will continue to correct typescripts by hand, so we must make sure they preserve those.

But what about the letter? As mailing systems get at once more expensive and more unreliable [there seems to be some sort of astral correlation between the two] and electronic mail becomes more widespread and ever cheaper (it costs virtually nothing already), and you get replies (and orders) instantly - so, except for other peoples' bills, who wants snail mail anymore?

It would be a shame, though, were letters to die. At their best they are a real art form. They are the closest equivalent to speech. They are the most human of documents. They can preserve a side of great writers, and of the ordinary man, and the flavour of an Age in a way no other medium can replicate. There is a real pleasure in post coming through the door [I'd have to buy an alarm clock], and using the excuse of opening the mail to arm oneself with a fresh cup of coffee in the conservatory and (if one does) to light up a cigarette (or remembering it even years after giving up). However thrilling emails are (especially orders waiting on the machine in the morning), they lack the sense of contact that a flesh and blood letter has.

Not that I would claim the same sensual and sentimental significances for letters as books, not in day-to-day terms anyway. But it is true that email evokes a certain sort of style from us that is different from the old-style letter. Is it partly that we have a screen in front of us (before, we had to conjure the recipient), partly that most people can type faster than they write, partly because we feel emails are more ephemeral? And maybe, at present, because you don't have the full text of the letter to you just at hand.

So, a lot of manuscripts and letters are, for the first time in much of civilised history, likely to cease being part of the normal way in which ordinary people do things, part of the common ways of communicating.

It is my belief that this will, however, result in a renaissance of the 'dead' letter, so to speak. [I don't mean those lost by the Post Office (remember the Dead Letter Department?)] I mean the regard that people will have for, the reverence in which they will hold, old manuscripts and letters.

As hand-written materials pass out of normal currency, cease to have the parallels in ordinary life that they have at present, they will acquire a richer fascination. They will always be vehicles for the transmission of texts, final repositories of the truth, but they will also be seen, much more, simply as artefacts of bygone ages, as forms of contact, magical field forces, revered and collected as such. Their status as holy relics will increase. They will, at last, become antiques.

The future of the past will only get better -- if we can continue to find enough of the stuff.

Roy Davids