Letters
The Hand Press in a Kansas Barn
On a farm outside Lawrence, Kansas, a 200-year-old iron hand press still prints books. The man who runs it says the press has taught him patience he did not ask for.
Section
Letters
Pieces about the things people write down and the people who write them, from small Icelandic libraries to Kansas hand presses.
Letters
The Unsent Letters of a Boston Printer
In a basement at the American Antiquarian Society, the unpublished correspondence of a forgotten Boston printer reveals what a working life looked like before the telephone.
Letters
The 4,800 Pages of Eliza Bertram
For thirty-two years, a small-town Iowa schoolteacher wrote down every day. What she made was not a diary. It was a country.
Letters
The Bookbinder's Daughter Who Memorized the Naples Catalog
In a workshop above a bindery in the Spanish Quarter, an old woman recites, from memory, the catalog of a library that no longer exists.
Letters
The Two Gaelic Verbs Still Spoken in Strontian
In a small village on the western Scottish coast, two verbs of Scots Gaelic survive in daily use that have died everywhere else. A linguist has spent a decade trying to understand why.
Letters
The Catalan Dictionary That Took Three Generations
In a village outside Girona, a family began a dictionary in 1923. The grandson finished it last year. He says the hardest entries were the ones his grandfather had already attempted.
Letters
The Library in Húsavík That Lends More Than Books
In a fishing town on Iceland's north coast, a small library lends seeds, fiddles, and bicycles. The librarian says she is only extending what a library always was.
Letters
The Long Correspondence of the Borges Translators
For twenty-seven years, two amateur translators traded letters about a single Borges story. What they were really arguing over was the shape of attention.