ED’S LETTER

Are you young – or old – enough (it’s all relative) to remember the song “Video Killed the Radio Star” by

The Buggles? In 1980, it was a favourite at the school dances that were held every Friday night in the Boy Scout Hall in my home town. At the time, the song was a nostalgic lamentation of the uncontrolled pace of technological innovation, but it turns out The Buggles needn’t have worried. Forty years later, radio is alive and flourishing while VHS and Betamax will never be exhumed.

It’s the same with books. I recently read that book sales worldwide are increasing, specifically printed books. In 2018 in the USA, book sales generated $26 billion in revenue. The sale of digital books only made up 10 % of that figure. There’s place for both print and digital, but don’t underestimate the tangible quality of words in print. There are several studies showing that reading on paper instead of a screen improves your ability to comprehend and remember what you’ve read. Like the art and photographs you hang on your walls, your books and magazines displayed in your home proclaim your tastes and preferences. When I visit friends or strangers, I find myself drawn to their bookshelves, where I learn more about them in a few minutes than in the subsequent hour around the dining room table.

I had plenty of time to read recently, after

I fell off my mountain bike, broke a clavicle and had to wear my arm in a sling for seven weeks. The first thing I did was ask my son to drive me to my favourite bookshop in the world, Clarke’s in Long Street in Cape Town. There, I bought Walter Isaacson’s biography of Leonardo da Vinci, a book about Winston Churchill by

Max Hastings, and – since mine was broken

– The Body by Bill Bryson.

Once I had read those books, I took Victor Frankl’s little masterpiece Man’s Search for Meaning off my own bookshelf and read it again. Matterhorn, Karl Marlantes’s epic novel about the Vietnam War, followed. This, too, was a book that I had read before, bought years ago on my Kindle. But when I started reading it again on that digital device, I was unsatisfied – as if I was doing Marlantes a disservice. Like the other books I had read over the summer, his needed to be worthy of paper, so I went out and bought a “real” version for my bookcase. I’ll enjoy it even more when I read it again a few years from now. Enjoy this copy of go! – and display it with pride if it’s on paper.