Yours, Isaac Asimov A Life in Letters [Paperback]

Isaac Asimov was one of the most prolific authors of our time. When he died in 1992 at the age of seventy-two, he had published more than 470 books in nearly every category of fiction and nonfiction. Asimov was a prodigious correspondent as well as a prolific author. During his professional career he received more than one hundred thousand letters, over ninety thousand of which he answered.

For Asimov's younger brother, veteran newspaperman Stanley Asimov, the creation ofYours, Isaac Asimovwas truly a labor of love. Completed before Stanley's death in August 1995, the book is made up of excerpts from one thousand never-before-published letters, each handpicked by Stanley for inclusion in this volume. Arranged by subject and accompanied by Stanley's short, insightful introductions, here are letters to statesmen and scientists, actors and authors, as well as to children, housewives, aspiring writers, and fans the world over. The letters are warm, engaging, reasoned, and occasionally impassioned. Through them all Isaac Asimov's legendary genius, wit, and charm shine through.

And so we haveYours, Isaac Asimov: A Lifetime of Letters, an intimate glimpse into the thoughts, feelings, and opinions of a great writer and thinker of the modern age. As Stanley Asimov advised, "Read the letters carefully. One of them may have been written to you."Stanley Asimovwas the former vice president for editorial administration atNewsday, and served on the adjunct faculty of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He spent two years reading and sifting through more than a half ton of his older brother’s letters. Stanley died in August 1995.b>Chapter 4
Typewriters, Word Processors and Computers

Isaac loved his typewriters.  Only rarely did they let him down.


30 July 1969

Last weekend, my Selectric IBM typewriter went awry just after IBM service shut down for lÃ"