The lost art of letter-writing.

(From Guardian Unlimited)

Handwriting; paper; letters: they are drifting from our lives. But there's something in the air, for three books this autumn are devoted to this trio of intertwined subjects: Philip Hensher's The Missing Ink ; Ian Sansom's Paper ; and John O'Connell 's For the Love of Letters . A sense of loss suffuses all these works (Sansom's book makes it plain with his subtitle, "an elegy"). But perhaps these books, this feeling, will spark a revival in the handling of the fountain pen and the wielding of the Basildon Bond. Perhaps it's like pastoral: a genre that could be invented only when the idea of the urban was fully established, Theocritus writing about …