Roger Angell laments the loss of letter-writing in The New Yorker:

We’ve done this to ourselves, of course, and done it eagerly, with our tweets and texts, our Facebook chat, our flooding e-mails, and our pleasure in the pejorative “snail mail.”

The same story told in images: here’s a wonderful collection of Time Magazine photographs of famous authors, poets, performers (including Ernest Hemingway, Agatha Christie, Bob Dylan…) and their typewriters.