Review by New York Times Review
ONCE THERE WERE letters: handwritten, typewritten, carefully crafted, dashed off, profound or mundane, tinged with expectancy. Correspondence required waiting. "I need you more and more, and the great world grows wider, and dear ones fewer and fewer, every day that you stay away," Emily Dickinson wrote to her future sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert, in 1852. Were they alive today, would Dickinson and Gilbert merely G-chat? Simon Garfield might think so. His latest book, "To the Letter," is a nostalgic and fretful look at the "lost art" of letter writing. "A world without letters would surely be a world without oxygen," he declares, noting that his book confronts this possibility. It's tempting to laugh nervously and say, "Why so ominous?" But then again, OMG, maybe he's got a point. A certain artfulness has surely been lost as emoticons and Snapchats take over as modes of expression. For the most part, Garfield - a British journalist whose previous books include studies of fonts and mapmaking - steers clear of contrasting the virtues of pen and paper with the sins of email and text messages. But sometimes he can't help himself. He writes, for instance, that emails are "a poke," and letters "a caress." A strange analogy, to be sure, and anyone who has agonized over a lengthy, emotional email to a friend, lover or family member might disagree. He also claims that the last letter "will appear in our lifetime," and that we will not notice the passing of this final missive until it's too late - "like the last hair to whiten, or the last lovemaking." Such weird rhetorical turns are, thankfully, few and far between. Garfield's book is stuffed with marvelous anecdotes, fascinating historical tidbits and excerpts from epistolary masters both ancient (Cicero, Seneca) and modern (Woolf, Hemingway). By the late 19th century, the "letter-writing manual" had itself become a thriving literary genre. Lewis Carroll contributed some prescriptive advice in the booklet "Eight or Nine Wise Words About Letter-Writing": "If your correspondent makes a severe remark, either ignore it or soften your response; if your friend is friendly, make your reply ever friendlier." It's wonderful to learn about the iPads of ancient Rome - thin wooden writing tablets sliced from alder, birch and oak - and to stumble on this delightful closing phrase of a letter dating to the third century A.D.: "Remember my pigeons." Or to encounter an exasperated Erasmus, chiding his brother for not having written back: "I believe it would be easier to get blood from a stone than coax a letter out of you!" The letters of Marcus Aurelius reveal not a would-be Roman emperor but a lovesick youth pining for his teacher. "I am dying so for love of you," Aurelius writes, to which his tutor replies, "You have made me dazed and thunderstruck by your burning love." Throughout, Garfield uncovers startling examples of lust ("I think of your breasts more than is good for me," a British soldier writes to his sweetheart), intimacy and suffering. Some of the most poignant letters expose the private anguish of writers and poets. The correspondence between Leonard Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, in the aftermath of Virginia Woolf's suicide, is devastating for what cannot be expressed. Despite Garfield's alarmist stance, it seems premature to assume that letters will go the way of the woolly mammoth. After all, the death knell has been sounded since at least the invention of the telephone. In any case, his epistolary ardor proves infectious, as he reminds us of the pleasures of composing letters without password protection or "send" buttons, those secured in dusty bureaus rather than "in the cloud." One of the letter's strongest defenses comes from Katherine Mansfield, who in a tender note to a friend conveys beautifully, and succinctly, what the form at its best can achieve. "This is not a letter," she writes, "but my arms around you for a brief moment." CARMELA CIURARU is the author of "Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 1, 2013]
Review by Booklist Review
*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 Sevigne, 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. Garfield's 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.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
UK author Garfield (Just My Type) here pens an ode to a dying art, that of the handwritten letter. Having previously explored stamp collecting, maps, typography, and even the color mauve, he again crafts meticulous literary nonfiction that displays great zeal for an arguably obscure topic. His 15 chapters take readers from ancient Rome to the days of Henry VIII, from Jane Austen to Sylvia Plath and, in the final chapter, to the origins of our digital substitute for letter writing, email. Garfield includes numerous letters in their entirety. Those between a World War II-era couple particularly add interest and spice to the narrative. Readers should note that, in keeping with the theme, this is not a short read: the author takes a leisurely approach to his chronology of letters and their writers. Where other titles on this topic tend to focus on a certain subject (e.g., war letters, love letters) or a sole pair of correspondents, Garfield's book is a celebration of the entire genre, whose decline will be seen by readers as a true loss. VERDICT A solid choice for fans of microhistories, paper trails, or epistolary works. [Prepub Alert, 6/15/13]-Stacey Rae Brownlie, Harrisburg Area Community Coll. Lib., -Lancaster, PA (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A tribute to writing personal letters, courtesy of the widely curious Garfield (On the Map: A Mind-Expanding Exploration of the Way the World Looks, 2012, etc.). The author asks, "What else could bring back a world and an individual's role within it so directly, so intensely, so plainly and so irresistibly? Only letters." Garfield seeks to show readers the significance of this lost art. When there was conscious effort made to get things right the first time--especially with those prepaid airmail fold-ups--both the sender and the recipient received ample rewards (certainly more than through email). Throughout history, there have been countless exemplary letter writers, and Garfield covers much ground, from Roman centurions in B.C. Britain to Charles Schultz and Charlie Brown. All the while, the author maintains his sense of storytelling wonder, a diverting patter that allows the pages to slip past even as he examines how letters reveal motivation, deepen understanding, give evidence, change lives and rewrite history. The letters on display are as varied as a patchwork quilt--Aristotle, Seneca, Cicero, Erasmus ("Have you so completely rid yourself of all brotherly feeling, or has all thought of your Erasmus wholly fled your heart?"), Emily Dickinson (in her letter to literary critic Thomas Wentworth Higginson, she writes, "You speak of Mr. Whitman. I never read his book, but was told that it was disgraceful"), Keats, Kerouac, Heloise and Abelard, Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, Henry Miller and Anas Nin--but Garfield draws out their commonality and continuity. He also provides short detours along the way, introducing the postal system, stamps, drop boxes and that saddest of destinations, the dead-letter office. Katherine Mansfield once wrote to a friend, "This is not a letter but my arms around you for a brief moment." Garfield provides a fond, lovely reflection on the essence of that sentiment.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
