:00:00. > :00:00.longer at the castle but back at the zoo. Great images. Man wrestles
:00:00. > :00:00.monkey. Now it is time for this week's Meet The Author with Nick
:00:07. > :00:10.Higham. Simon Garfield writes what he calls books about small things
:00:11. > :00:16.that mean a lot. He has written about the history of wrestling,
:00:17. > :00:21.about a radio one. His last two books were about typefaces and the
:00:22. > :00:27.history of maths. Now he has written a book about the journey through a
:00:28. > :00:30.vanishing world. It is a history of letters and letter writing from the
:00:31. > :00:40.earliest days right down to the present.
:00:41. > :00:51.Simon Garfield, you start this book by saying that letter writing is
:00:52. > :00:58.dying. Why? Obvious reasons, I'm afraid. The answer is e`mail. I was
:00:59. > :01:02.keen with the book not to sort of right and anti`e`mail book. I use it
:01:03. > :01:09.all the time. It has transformed our world. What we don't do is write in
:01:10. > :01:18.any depth. We don't express our emotions as Woodward in a letter. ``
:01:19. > :01:23.as we would in a letter. The idea of writing a letter for my kids, why
:01:24. > :01:28.would they do that? You have to write neatly, get the post, and it
:01:29. > :01:35.would cost you. That is the reason it is dying, unfortunately. We are
:01:36. > :01:45.used to the technology now. Your contention is it has change
:01:46. > :01:49.qualitatively the way people right. It is a simple thing, really.
:01:50. > :01:54.Letters make you think more. There is a slower, Serena wearing of the
:01:55. > :02:05.brain. You amass information over time. `` cerebrally. The physical
:02:06. > :02:12.thing is important as well. My big concern, my reason for writing the
:02:13. > :02:16.book, was how are we going to catalogue our past? How are we going
:02:17. > :02:21.to tell our history through e`mail? That is the crucial question. Of
:02:22. > :02:26.course, e`mails will be there. But will they be there when we destroy
:02:27. > :02:30.our computers? Will our relatives find anything. They will not find
:02:31. > :02:37.printed e`mails in the attic. How will historians access our disk
:02:38. > :02:51.drive is an computers? There is lots in here. Quotations from famous
:02:52. > :03:01.letter writers. Napoleon, letters from Napoleon, Jane Austin. Why are
:03:02. > :03:06.Jane Austin's letters so dull? That is a chapter title. Not everybody
:03:07. > :03:11.would agree with this, it is opinionated, the book. She wrote her
:03:12. > :03:16.letters in her books, very much. Her books have a great grounding in our
:03:17. > :03:27.correspondence. One or two actually began as letters. One reason is
:03:28. > :03:33.because she clearly didn't... She was in close contact with all the
:03:34. > :03:41.people she wrote to. Another reason is when she died, a lot of the more
:03:42. > :03:47.interesting letters were burnt. That is the other thing. You could argue
:03:48. > :03:50.that actually, that is one great thing about e`mails. They are harder
:03:51. > :03:55.to burn. There are more copies out there. Some of the most moving
:03:56. > :04:01.letters you quote letters of condolence or letters around death.
:04:02. > :04:06.You talk about the suicides of two great 20th`century authors, Virginia
:04:07. > :04:10.Woolf and Sylvia Plath, both of which were still at Madras in a
:04:11. > :04:12.side. They were striking in many ways. ` microbrews of which were
:04:13. > :04:26.suicides. Ted Hughes doesn't get a bad press
:04:27. > :04:34.from me. I make the point that had a lot of those letters come out early,
:04:35. > :04:42.his reputation wouldn't be so harsh. My parents died when I was young.
:04:43. > :04:46.Those condolence letters were the first ones I remember coming through
:04:47. > :04:52.en masse. You get letters every day. But the idea of a big bulk
:04:53. > :05:00.coming through, almost jamming the letterbox, I remember those. I
:05:01. > :05:03.thought OK, this is interesting, there's a condolence letter from
:05:04. > :05:10.Argentina or wherever. They had a personal resonance with me.
:05:11. > :05:13.Condolence letters are one of the few that have survived. We still
:05:14. > :05:18.like condolence letters. We would have to be very hard part two writer
:05:19. > :05:27.condolence e`mail. Although, how long? How long before that becomes
:05:28. > :05:31.the norm? Love letters. You quote a lot of love letters. The thing that
:05:32. > :05:36.holds the book together is a sequence of love letters written by
:05:37. > :05:39.a man called Chris Barker, who was serving in the Second World War. The
:05:40. > :05:48.letters he wrote back to the woman who eventually became his life. They
:05:49. > :05:52.are the ordinary correspondence of a passionate people, people who become
:05:53. > :05:57.passionate. It was only by chance that they ended up in the book.
:05:58. > :06:01.Yes, I was about three quarters of the way through the book, through
:06:02. > :06:07.writing the book. I realised that what I really wanted was a
:06:08. > :06:13.correspondence between two people who are unknown. I had asked around.
:06:14. > :06:25.I wanted something that was unpublished, unknown people. I am a
:06:26. > :06:29.trustee of the mass of sedation Association. `` mathematics
:06:30. > :06:36.observation association. I asked and the woman I spoke to said, funnily
:06:37. > :06:41.enough, two weeks ago we received this fantastic archive. Do you want
:06:42. > :06:49.to have a look? It is a remarkable thing. I was in tears when I read
:06:50. > :06:53.the letters. It was an extraordinary thing. I thought, this is what I
:06:54. > :06:58.need to really demonstrate what we are going to lose. I threaded them
:06:59. > :07:05.through the book as an example. Hopefully, you learn as you go
:07:06. > :07:09.along, as if you were learning, rather than be telling the whole
:07:10. > :07:15.story at the beginning. For me, it holds the whole book together. We
:07:16. > :07:18.know the outcome. It has a... We know the story has a happy outcome
:07:19. > :07:25.for some they got married, happily married, had kids. Thank you very
:07:26. > :07:37.much indeed. This is BBC News. Coming up in the
:07:38. > :07:43.next few minutes: We will have the latest from Grangemouth as it looks
:07:44. > :07:44.as though hundreds of subcontractors are likely to lose their jobs as the