Somewhere near the White House, on a non-descript floor of a non-descript office building, an entire team of people sift through President Obama’s mail — thousands of letters daily. This is actual mail, the kind people put stamps on and mail carriers deliver. (I know! Despite everything you’ve heard, people still do that.)

Out of those thousands of letters, 10 are selected and sent over to the White House. Obama reads them each night. He likes it — even the ones that begin “Dear Jackass.”

Eli Saslow is a reporter on the national staff of The Washington Post. He’s insanely talented. (He doesn’t know this, but I secretly nicknamed him “A New Hope.”) A while back, Eli wrote an amazing story about how those 10 letters are chosen and sent to Obama and what motivated some of the people who write to the president to send their letters. (And how amazed or even puzzled they are when they get a handwritten reply.)

It was one of those stories that’s so good you think “This should be a–” and you’re already too late. The agent has called, the book contract is already signed, and off Eli went to report more about the lives of the people who wrote to Obama in 2010.

Now the book is out. Ten Letters: The Stories Americans Tell Their Presidents. I’ve started reading it. It’s good. It’s also the purest sort of old-school feature writing. It doesn’t announce any grand theme in the first 10 pages. It’s not about the writer writing the book. It just goes. You get the concept right away, so now you want to go deep into people’s lives, without judgment or heavy commentary. Every book claims to be “about America,” but this one just might be.

Want a signed copy of the actual book — the kind you hold in your hand and turn the pages of? I’ve got three copies here waiting for Eli to sign. One of them could be yours. All you must do is send me an e-mail (send it to hank [at] this web site dot com) and ask me nicely and I will mail it to you.

Hurry! Once they’re gone, they’re gone.

UPDATE: They’re all GONE. That was really fast. Thanks, everyone.

I was struck by this picture I saw on the New Yorker‘s Book Bench blog, which they found on the White House’s Flickr photo account. Those are the president’s hands. That’s his health-care bill signing speech. [UPDATE: A couple of commenters here have said it isn't Tuesday's speech; I was going by some of the content of the speech -- health care -- and the fact that the upload date on the photo is March 22. If anyone wants to analyze or report it out from what we can see, please do.] [UPDATE 2: see comments below.] That’s Jon Favreau, his speechwriter, next to him. Just look at what sort of line-editing you get when you write speeches for Obama. (Click here for a close-up)

A photo like this is thrilling, gratifying and also terribly frightening to anyone who delivers his or her own writing to an editor. (Or a group of editors.) I wonder how this picture makes other people feel. I see it and feel a swelling of pride — not in the president so much as in the hard work that goes into good writing.

But I also get a lurching feeling in my stomach. I have marked up my own drafts like this, and, when invited, I have done the same for other writers. (Though probably not to this extent.) I certainly have received manuscript pages back from George Hodgman that looked like this.

When it comes back to you in this condition, you have to take a deep breath and just deal with each mark, one by one.

At the Washington Post, we don’t edit on paper. The equivalent to this picture would be to come over to your editor’s desk and see your story up on his or her screen, filled with “red notes,” sort of like the edit-track function in Microsoft Word. Questions are in red. Cuts are in red. Suggestions for rewrites are in red. My eye is trained to immediately look for instances of red; only once, on an edit with Henry Allen several years ago, did I open the file and see more red than black. (Which turned out to be false panic — most of the red was actually a long note from Henry after the lead paragraph suggesting that I veered off in the wrong direction.)

I think Joel Garreau might have been the last editor I had who liked to mark up a hard-copy printout of a feature by one of his reporters. (Sometimes he’d disappear to the men’s room with it, which lends a whole new meaning to clean copy.)

I do know a lot of my colleagues still hit ctrl-P so they can edit their own work from a hard copy. Delightfully, we even have an option to print it out as justified columns of type in the Post font. I still love to print out a story and, if there’s time, take it with me to a quiet bar, order a glass of wine, and have at it.

I did a lot of that with Tinsel chapters — mark, mark, scratch, circle, fix, scribble [pause for sip of wine, maybe a Sancerre, maybe a Malbec, sometimes not wine, sometimes a Jack and 7] and then read on, scribble some more, try not to eat too many bowls of snack mix.

The sort of paperwork created by hard-copy editing mostly belongs in the recycling bin, but it is a gold mine for research archives and literary sleuths. It’s too bad future researchers won’t have many of this era’s marked-up drafts to pore over.

This picture also makes me think of how many people would shit their pants if you handed back their writing with this many marks on it.

Starting about a decade ago, there were lots of stories about teachers who switched from red pens to happier colors (purple, green) when marking-up student assignments, so as to soften the blow to kids who grow up in a cocoon of praise and esteem-building feedback.

You can only imagine what sort of parent-teacher conferences would be arranged, or formal complaints immediately filed to the department chair or dean’s office, if teachers and professors started handing back papers that looked like Obama’s edits. I say Jon Favreau is earning his pay. ($172,000.)