While some people talk about newspapers dying, W&L student researchers have been bringing the letters published in old local newspapers back to life. Now, about 400 of those letters to the editor have been collected in The Lexington Letters: Two Centuries of Water Under the Bridge, edited by Associate Prof. Doug Cumming. The project began in 2010 as a joint venture of the journalism and theater departments. Prof. Cumming and theater Prof. Kimberly Jew guided four W&L students, as R.E. Lee Summer Research Fellows, through microfilm and bound copies of local weeklies going back to 1804. The original plan was to deliver this rich material to a theater class to create a play. This was done. The play “Lexington’s Letters to the Editor,” artfully edited by Jew, had a well-attended three-night run at the Theater at Lime Kiln in May.

Cumming, a media historian, couldn’t let the best of the remaining 1,200 or so transcribed letters go to waste, so he proposed a book to Mariner Publishing in Buena Vista. That book just came out on Nov. 9. The two editors will be signing copies in Lexington Nov. 25 at Books & Co., from 11 a.m.-1 p.m., and The Bookery, 1-3 p.m.