An ode to a fading art form of communication

To The Letter

**By** Simon Garfield

**Canongate,** €21.40

**Reviewed** by Brendan Daly

.....

The ancient art of letter-writing has been eclipsed by new technologies and the colonisation of our free time by the pressures of work. So read a report in the Yale Review in 1919. The technologies it blamed - the typewriter and telegraph - are now relics, but the article rehearsed an argument that sharply resonates with contemporary concerns.

If letter-writing ...