Megan Marshall has a nice piece in Slate (December 7 edition) on Thomas Mallon’s new book about letter — not email — writing. FD suspects that the situation isn’t as bad as advertised, that is the art/practice of letter writing hasn’t been totally subsumed by email, text messaging and IM. FD and Mr FD still writes actual letters, and gets some in return, and surely we aren’t alone. There’s a great little card/stationery store in our town, that seems to be doing OK, at least they aren’t out of business yet!
Not that FD’s letters will ever the basis of a biography, and of all FD’s correspondents, only one set of letters is being saved at the moment by FD (Now, Mr. FD saves everything, so may have a lot of letters in boxes somewhere — FD tries not to think about what’s in Mr FD’s study) . FD does have a small supply of letters from writers (collected when FD was the editor/publisher of a small literary magazine) and has been thinking about looking for library or historical society collections to which they can be donated — FD would like to simplify life and reduce physical belongings. That’s about the only advantage FD sees to electronic over paper communication.