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