title: To the Letter: A Celebration of the Lost Art of Letter Writing
author:  Simon Garfield 
description: *Starred Review* Garfield is a best-selling writer of irresistible enthusiasm. He has energetically and knowledgeably celebrated stamps (The Error World, 2008), typefaces (Just My Type, 2011), and maps (On the Map, 2012). Now he champions the infinitely expressive and influential tradition of letter writing. For centuries, Garfield observes, letters have been the lubricant of human interaction and the free fall of ideas, and he presents many provocative examples, from letters written by the Romans in Britain two thousand years ago, establishing the conventions of greetings and farewells, to the correspondence of Cicero, Madame de Svign, Virginia Woolf, and Jack Kerouac. Garfield covers the evolution of various postal services, tells curious tales about how letters end up in auction houses and libraries, contrasts letters and e-mails (a hybrid between a letter and a phone call), and ponders the challenges of maintaining digital archives. Threaded throughout is a suspenseful British WWII epistolary love story: the courtship-by-mail between post-office employees Chris Barker, serving in the Royal Air Force and stationed in Libya, Italy, and Greece, and Bessie Moore, transferred to the Foreign Office on the home front. Garfields robust and propulsive engagement with letters as an essential embodiment of the human spirit and a driving cultural force makes for exciting reading and thoughtful speculation about the future of scholarship and communication. --Donna Seaman
zlib_text: Letters on Literature
  1
  Letters on Literature
  By Andrew Lang
  
  Letters on Literature
  2
  DEDICATION
  Dear Mr. Way,
  After so many letters to people who never existed, may I venture a
  short one, to a person very real to me, though I have never seen him, and
  only know him by his many kindnesses?  Perhaps you will add another to
  these by accepting the Dedication of a little work, of a sort experimental in
  English, and in prose, though Horace--in Latin and in verse--was
  successful with it long ago?
  Very sincerely yours,
  A. LANG.
  To W. J. Way, Esq. Topeka, Kansas.
  
  Letters on Literature
  3
  PREFACE
  These Letters were originally published in the Independent of New
  York.  The idea of writing them occurred to the author after he had
  produced "Letters to Dead Authors."  That kind of Epistle was open to
  the objection that nobody would write so frankly to a correspondent about
  his own work, and yet it seemed that the form of Letters might be
  attempted again.  The Lettres e Emilie sur la Mythologie are a