T.F. Torrey’s Things Worth Reading

One of the best features of the new revolution of publishing is that it makes it practical to publish things for which there is no market big enough to interest a traditional publisher. Before the revolution, things like family cookbooks, family histories, personal memoirs, and collections of personal letters would simply never have been published (unless the author was a celebrity). Such stories would either never have been put down in book form to begin with, or would have been confined to a binder or a box and tucked away in a dusty drawer or a drafty attic. Now it is possible not merely to collect these stories in books but to package them such that they are available to anyone, at any time, world-wide. Check out this heartwarming story about a project to produce memory books, in a race not simply with the long sweep of time, but against the immediate scourge of Alzheimer’s. I wish the revolution had happened in time to preserve for me the stories of my grandparents and great grandparents. Someday, maybe, treasures like these will be taken for granted.