I am attracted to the design of books' covers, first, in used bookstores. I recently picked up an anthology of short stories by Bernard Malamoud (if his name sounds vaguely familiar, he wrote the story upon which the Robert Redford film "The Natural" was based), in a simply but beautifully bound book published in 1953. His works were published in the Atlantic and New Yorker and muliple other periodicals I'd never heard of or had forgotten. His language is absolutely beautiful. Expressive, yet economical. Malamoud was a man who thought about every word (as one would anyway, writing for periodicals), and at every phrase and clause, his work shows it. Reading this collection of short stories, unlike a lot of the mangled prose that passes for fiction nowadays, my mind felt like a hot knife slicing through butter. It has been years since I devoured a book in a single evening.

I mourn the death of this kind of writing. It's utterly unique but very accessible, though recognizing the economy and perfection of certain word choices requires some prior experience with reading truly good material. That is in shorter and shorter supply as time goes by.

And now I fear it will not only disappear altogether, cleverness of the ideas will fall out of fashion in favor of the mediocre sameness that will plague all writing soon.