Even though
I just started the book on Sunday, I finished it this morning. I have the week off so I've been spending some time reading, amongst other things.
I can heartily recommend Paul and First Century Letter Writing (amazon.com). Richards does a great job focusing studies of the mechanics of writing letters in the first century and applying what we know about Paul from his own letters.
Readers of ricoblog know that in the past I blogged about and recommended Hans-Jozef Klauck's Ancient Letters and the New Testament (amazon.com) as an introduction to epistolography. I still stand by that, Klauk's book is a good general introduction to epistolography (not just NT, but epistolography in general). I'd recommend Paul and First Century Letter Writing (amazon.com) over Klauck because Richards is less technical and more directly applicable to NT epistles, particularly those of Paul. I'd go so far as to say that if you teach a course on Paul's epistles, you'd do well to consider requiring Paul and First Century Letter Writing (amazon.com) as a text so the students can get a grasp of how Paul might've actually gone about composing his letters.
Here's the brief TOC of Paul and First Century Letter Writing (amazon.com):
Introduction
1: A Modern, Western Paul
2: Paul as a First-Century Letter Writer
3: The Tools of a Letter Writer
4: Secretaries in the First Century World
5: Paul's Use of a Secretary
6: Identifying Inserted Material
7: Weaving Together a Letter
8: Classifying Paul's Letters
9: Analyzing Paul's Writing Style
10: Preparing a Letter for Dispatch
11: Dispatching the Letter
12: Paul's Letter Carriers
13: Paul's Use of His Letter Carriers
14: Collecting Paul's Letters
15: Inspiration and First-Century Letter Writing
Conclusion
Again, this book is heartily recommended.
Next book in my queue: Lexical Priming: A New Theory of Words and Language (amazon.com) by Michael Hoey. This was recommended to me by my friend Randall Tan; we'll be writing a paper applying some of Hoey's concepts to NT Greek for International SBL in Vienna (though I won't be able to attend the conference). I'm sure I'll blog a bit about that as I read it. Dunno if I'll get through it as fast as this last one, though.