Letters are a tactile written communication traversing centuries and continents, bringing other people, places and times to life with immediacy and personality. Here we celebrate this ancient form of exchange. Send me a handwritten postcard, will you?
Write and gripe
I like letter writers who gripe about the responses (or lack of) from correspondents. Pliny is the arch whinger when he doesn't think his friends have written him fast, frequent or long enough letters. But I liked Bernstein's keeping tally - a 7-pager deserves at...
Stay alive and write
Here is Leonard Bernstein exhorting a friend to take care, stay alive and write back. This was even before the war, when the 'stay alive' element became more urgent. Again, be careful, stay alive, write. Source: Leonard Bernstein, letter to Kenneth Ehrman, April...
The Magic Ink-Pot
Always on the hunt for treasures among forgotten children's books, I came across this one by chance when I was rather looking at glorious buildings and libraries stashed around the National Trust. It seems The Magic Ink-Pot was born out of a mother writing...
With love
Enjoy 'With Love', an online exhibition of love letters created by the UK's National Archives. It's a fine, touching and diverse selection, both in terms of the range of emotions and the backgrounds of the writers, presented in manuscripts, transcriptions and audio...
What is a letter? A tactile written communication that bridges distance and lasts forever.
The innovation of envelopes
They’re so ubiquitous that it’s a surprise to learn envelopes were a mid-nineteenth century invention. Somewhere in Gaskell I remember a character protesting at this new-fangled costly creation. Previously people...
The last and the first
Hand written cards and letters are part of an ancient but rapidly dying art, hardly helped by the high ratio of people who like or love receiving them to people...
In mourning
In the 19th century, it was customary to use black-bordered paper and envelopes to inform someone of a death. Here Sebastian finds unused sheets in some forgotten bureau in the...
Signs of civilization
I liked Durrell's simple assessment of two building blocks of a recovering civilization after the ravages of war: a functioning post office and a few working street lamps.Â
See also...
The pleasure of paper post
One of the greatest pleasures of Christmas, for me anyhow, is the sending and receiving of cards, one of the few genres of paper post that still seem to hold...
Straight as an avenue of poplars
When was the last time you received - or wrote - an 18 page letter? Â I think I have managed to write one or two in my life and that's...
A letter by boat and about a boat
This letter is magical. It is delivered by boat and announces the arrival of another boat at an assignation point.
So much promise! May the whole world seem to be...
No post and plenty of censorship
We don't know how lucky we are, having access to many forms of communication, electronic or postal, and being free of censorship. Here Stefan Zweig describes the conditions in which...
Letters kept, letters destroyed
Given the fragility of letters, it’s astounding how many have survived centuries and even millennia. Added to which it seems quite common for people to have purposely destroyed them, whether...
A bundle of letters
It is now so rare to receive a letter (not talking about bills or other officialese, but real letters) that it's hard to imagine receiving more than could be read...
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