Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Electronic's good but I prefer pen and paper

Scribbling on a postcard at the Raffles Hotel souvenir shop in Singapore. What's interesting about this shop is it has an old-fashioned red mailbox on the counter where you can mail your card once filled up. Would that all similar shops have one installed. That should encourage more handwritten mail.
 "I've come to the conclusion that handwriting is good for us. It involves us in a relationship with the written word that is sensuous, immediate and individual. It opens our personality out to the world, and gives us a means of reading other people. It gives pleasure when you communicate with it. No one is ever going to recommend that we surrender the convenience and speed of electronic communications to pen and paper. Though it would make no sense to give up the clarity and authority of print which is available to anyone with a keyboard, to continue to diminish the place of the handwritten in our lives is to diminish, in a small but real way, our humanity."--Philip Hensher, "Why handwriting matters," The Observer,
Still life with postcards, sunglasses and ballpoint pen and homage to Somerset Maugham

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