farmdoc's blog post number 478

Increasingly the briefing documents for my work, come to me by email rather than pages in the post. Invariably I print the emailed documents – for I need to see them in hard copy form. I don’t know why. Maybe I’m conditioned to better absorb the content of paper documents. Perhaps I’ll relent in the future. Who knows. Probably for the same reason, I prefer to read books in paper form. So I’m in no rush to buy, or even try, a Kindle, an eBook reader, or whatever. In his book Reading the OED: One man, one year, 21730 pages, Ammon Shea writes of how he loves the smell of books and bookshops. I agree with him 100%. Until a week ago, Sweetheart Vivienne had seen her book Alzheimers: a love story only in electronic form. That is, the writing, the revision, and the iterative to-and-fro with her publisher and editor, had all been done by computer hardware and software. Until last Wednesday when the ‘first pages’ arrived by Express Post ready for the final proof-read prior to the first print run (of several, I hope). The ‘first pages’ show the page size, layout, fonts and pagination in their final form. What a joyous moment – to see, hold, touch and smell those ‘first pages. I’ll bet no matter how many books a writer writes, the thrill of the ‘first pages’ never abates. So now Sweetheart Vivienne’s dream’s finally assumed tangibility. I couldn’t be happier for her.