The Letter Exchange

Occasionally one reads about mail - usually a postcard, perhaps because they're small and thin - that got lost in the postal system for years and was finally delivered. That's not the only way mail can show up decades later, though. Here's a story about a group of postcards from a century ago that were found at an auction and sent to the descendants of the writer.

The text at this site is not very exciting...but the classic Peanuts cartoons are worth reading, including one that might be the beginning of the "pencil-pal" motif that ran through the strip for a long time.

We often hear that the number of letters people are writing continues to drop - and here's a site with a chart showing a 35% decrease in the U.S. during the 9-year period ending a year ago. After that dim statistic, though, the site goes on to explore the value of snail mail pen pals and mail art, with examples from a group of high school students in California. Ironically, despite the fact that the web is often blamed for the decrease in physical letters, this article mentions that posting pictures of snail mail envelopes online can inspire more people to create physical mail art.

Nowadays the main focus for postal services sometimes seems to be package delivery, or maybe it's junk mail, with the continued decline in personal correspondence by mail. But in other times and places, post offices did everything from reporting the local temperature to performing marriage ceremonies. An exhibit at a museum in New Zealand details some of what the post offices (and the old telephone systems) used to do.

The second full week in January is Universal Letter Writing Week, and this year retired letter carrier Carol Christmas challenges everyone to write a letter - or at least a card or note - each day.

Stories about postcard collections often focus on the pictures on the cards, sometimes from a standpoint of history, especially if the collection is of cards from a particular location or a particular time period. Other times they focus on the content of what people wrote on the cards - here's one of those.