“The attachment of writers to the old, tangible media is not just about money. The physical book seems like a fitting reward for the labour of writing a book.”

Andrew Martin, in the Financial Times, reviews Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times by Andrew Piper, Paper: An Elegy by Ian Sansom and The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting and Why It Still Matters by Philip Hensher.

Andrew Piper also wrote Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age, published by the University of Chicago Press: a study of the origins of our obsessions with books that date back to the turn of the 19th century.

“In revisiting the book’s rise through the prism of romantic literature, Piper aims to revise our assumptions about romanticism, the medium of the printed book, and, ultimately, the future of the book in our so-called digital age.”

Andrew Piper writes online at Book Was There.

He also wrote for Slate last month on how e-reading isn’t reading.

“Reading isn’t only a matter of our brains; it’s something that we do with our bodies. Reading is an integral part of our lived experience, our sense of being in the world, even if at times this can mean feeling intensely apart from it.

“How we hold our reading materials, how we look at them, navigate them, take notes on them, share them, play with them, even where we read them—these are the categories that have mattered most to us as readers throughout the long and varied history of reading. They will no doubt continue to do so into the future.”

Ian Sansom’s website includes a link to the Paper Museum.

Read more about Philip Hensher’s The Missing Ink here.