Binding no Tyranny.

I HAVE been inspired this day of a notion that occurred to me whilst I was tipping the many pieces of paper scattered about my room into the bin. I remember watching once with my grandmother an episode of Poirot with David Suchet of course, the best and the inimitable, when Poirot said, 'The world is drowning in paper.' It is too, and yet I remember also speaking with a bookseller in Redruth of Cornwall who said, when I quite naturally observed the self-evident superiority of older books in paper and binding, 'Yes, but there were very few people reading back then. Now it is damaging to the environment.' I doubted that statement at the time, and I still doubt it now. Was it really more damaging to the environment to print with the best paper and bind in the finest leather, when trees are felled and cows are slaughtered naturally in the course of a country's economy? Is it really less damaging to the environment for Apple to issue a new version of the same device every year, and render redundant the previous versions, each iteration using precious resources such as rare earth metals? As for more people reading, I very much doubt it. Of course more people are literate now than in those days perhaps, but as to the number of people who actually read a book on a yearly basis, I wonder if the number has not decreased.

   Anyway, my idea is as follows. Rather than that organisations such as Nationwide or English Heritage should send me week on week horrid pieces of useless paper that are instantly wasted and never read, they should send me yearly my Annual, printed on the finest paper in an exquisite typeset, and bound in excellent leather. Moreover, if I were to commend any company for the process it would be S. Ingram and D. Robinson Limited of the website haveitbound.com who are artists of the highest calibre and bound my book for me. By these means, our respective offices will be filled with beautiful annuals, the catalogues of our lives.