The Missing Ink by Philip Hensher and Paper by Ian Sansom Handwriting, he concludes, is good for us. It makes us both kinder and cleverer. We should do more of it. While Hensher's book is characterised by an elegant dilettantism (his publisher evidently has an eye on the posh Christmas stocking market), Ian Sansom's Paper: an Elegy has an intensity that might seem alarming if you didn't share his obsession. If you survive the first page of his introduction, "Respecting Paper," in which his fanatical attachment to the thin white stuff, not to mention his fondness for long lists and his wayward prose style are displayed in virtuoso fashion, you'll find that you've already succumbed to his passion. "This book will attempt to show... that reports of the death of paper have been greatly exaggerated," he writes, seizing his reader by the scruff of his literary neck and propelling him briskly around what he characterises as his Paper Museum, along a route that encompasses the making of paper, from tree to finished ream (his book, he observes, "is the product of one entire tree"); mapping, paper money, book-burning, the uses of paper in construction, in art, games, fashion, transport and a host of other functions. He lists, apologetically, the omissions from his collection: "no decoupage; no exam papers; no musical scores; no Top Trumps... There are so many types and kinds of paper that I have had to leave unfingered and untouched." Still for the novice paper-fancier, there is plenty to be going on with. Sansom's scholarship is prodigious; his enthusiasm inexhaustible. His range of reference extends from "an unexpectedly thrilling article about paper-based accounting and business systems in the British Association of Paper Historians" indispensable journal, The Quarterly," to Lady Gaga. He can make one laugh out loud by his placing of a single word ("Anyway"). His handsome book is printed in the elegant ITC Giovanni book font and furnished with notes but no index. He writes that when he dies, he wants to be buried in a paper coffin. And by the time you've finished reading this extraordinary book so will you. The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting by Philip Hensher 300pp, PICADOR, Buy now from Telegraph Books (RRP £14.99) Paper: An Elegy by Ian Samson 224pp, Fourth Estate, Buy now from Telegraph Books (RRP £14.99)