A letter is a piece of life.
— Adolf Deissmann
| More Than Words | |
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There's still time to catch the Smithsonian exhibit More Than Words: Illustrated Letters from the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art (page 6) – it will be in Louisiana during the spring, and Florida through early summer. The Smithsonian website has small pictures of some of the letters, and you can buy the accompanying book at Powell's.
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The Ghostly Side |
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What would happen if Jane Austen invited Harry Potter for a cup of tea? That's how reviewers tend to describe the books mentioned in Margaret Montet's article on Ghost Letters (page 7), Sorcery and Cecila and The Grand Tour – and there's a third book in the series now, The Mislaid Magician. The first two books are also available in one binding as Magicians of Quality. The Serpent's Egg doesn't seem to be in print at the moment, but it's easy to find on sites like Half.com They're not the first books written in the form of letters – that was quite popular in the 18th century, and Wikipedia claims the first "epistolary novel" was written near the end of the 15th century. The form fell out of favor after its heyday, but it's never disappeared, and the Wikipedia article lists a number of contemporary examples. Interested in the other writing sites mentioned in the article? Check out Friendship-By-Mail and Just Write Letters. And to start mapping your own mind, here's a link to several of Tony Buzan's books.
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| Dressing Up |
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Does the interview with Barb Nelis (page 12) leave you curious as to what her own mail art looks like? Check out this example. And here are handy links to the sites Barb mentions at the end of her interview: The Graceful Envelope |
| The World of Letters |
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Alexander Pope (page 20) is well-known as a poet, but in addition to letters he also wrote essays and translated The Iliad. Edmund Curll is hardly a household name (even among liberal arts students, most likely), but there are biographies available. Pope's satirical poem The Dunciad includes vicious criticism of Curll, who in response published a rebuttal that may have been written by Elizabeth Thomas, his source for the original Pope letters, and The Popiad, rumored to have been written by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, whose published letters were among the earliest to become popular. Pope, by the way, is credited with originating the phrases "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing", "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread", "To err is human, to forgive, divine","Hope springs eternal", "The proper study of Mankind is Man", and "Damn with faint praise" – of course, originating and popularizing are not always easy to disentangle.
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The Art of Letters |
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The Dover publication Books, Reading and Writing Illustrations contains several hundred pictures, from tiny sketches of pens to elaborate drawings like the one on page 25. It's available in multiple versions, some of which come with a disk containing the images, all of which are free from copyright hassles (so you won't have anyone making fun of you in a poem, at least not on that account!) | More Than Art |
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If you like the National Letter Writing Week poster on page 27, you can get it on a T-shirt or poster; hundreds more WPA posters are in the Library of Congress collection.
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| Clicking on most of the books on this page will take you to Powell's, the world's largest independent bookstore. You can also use the search engine to the left. Any purchase you make by following one of these links will help support LEX – not just these items but any book or DVD in their inventory. | |
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