“I guess that’s what you might call technology being recycled.”
It was a comment from someone looking at a book in a “fair trade” market. You know, those places where craft things from around the world are sold to encourage cottage industries in Third World countries.
The book itself was leather bound and its pages of homemade paper were stitched together in the way things had been done centuries before. “This paper is made from 100 per cent recycled cotton,” the label proclaimed along with a few other things.
But all the pages were blank. Presumably the person buying, or given, such a book would then craft his own text – write his own book, so to speak. Just like it was in the days of long ago when scribes copied books by hands.
Rather intimidating, when you think about it. We really don’t write much anymore. We text on our i-things. Or we generate stuff on a computer where we select the font to suit the occasion and then trust the computer’s spelling and grammar capabilities to “clean up” the things we write and want to convey.
Maybe the handcrafted book is suggesting that personal writing may be a craft at some time in the future. Maybe writing – the graceful, cursive script with pen and ink – will soon be an extra-curricular activity in our schools.
There is one time in the New Testament when the apostle Paul points out that he is actually doing the writing of a letter himself. “I, Paul, write this with my own hand,” he says in the 19th verse of a letter to Philemon.
Personal writing, it would seem, emphasizes the truth or importance of a document. A skill not lightly to be put aside.