The Art and Pleasure of Letter Writing

​“Letter writing is the only device for combining solitude with good company.” -Lord Byron

Dear Readers,

             I hope the missive finds you well.
           
In the past the exchange of letters was a serious form of entertainment. Back when the news cycle[1] was a matter of days, weeks, and months, not hours and minutes, most days were slow news days and I imagine there was an excitement about getting a letter in the mail. It might have been enough to buoy a person for days and weeks, even more so when the letter was from a loved one who had moved far away, or from a colleague in a particular field of research and inquiry who did not live close by. The exchange of gossip or ideas was a pleasure in itself.

When a mother heard about a son’s adventures trying to make a living or a name for himself in a distant city, it brought relief to her worries, an update to his latest activities, and an idea of what life was like in San Francisco, as opposed to St. Louis, or a farm in Iowa. A father hearing from a daughter who’d moved on with her new family to make a go of it in South Dakota got to keep up with the growth of his progeny in times when travel was rare, difficult, or otherwise expensive.  Childhood friends could stay in touch and new friends from far away, met by circumstance, would become pen pals and keep each other posted on what was going on in their lives if each was amenable and of the right temperament.

Did I mention gossip? I thought I did, but maybe it’s just a rumor. The salacious spreading of rumor, suggestion, and innuendo has long been a habitual pastime among humans. The kind of letter filled with juicy tidbits about the goings-on of cousins, neighbors, coworkers, in-laws, ex-laws and outlaws was the proper place to write about what might have otherwise been improper to say out loud in the polite society of our not-so-distant past. When these letters got shared with others, they became like tabloid rags for socialites and the hangers-on at court or those who aspired to aristocratic social positions.

People never stopped entirely writing letters to each other, but due to their analog nature, they seem to have reached something of a nadir point for most folks in our society. Even the traditional Christmas letter that people used to send, updating one family on everything going on with another family over the past year, has been replaced by shallow cards, or by pics of the family with their pets. I like getting pictures and cards from my cousins and friends at the end of the year, but often times there is hardly anything in it more than a note.
Is the high school love note endangered? The people in high school now are part of a generation that has grown up with cell phones. Teen texting has replaced the teen love note, furtively folded in sweaty palms then exchanged between classes or given to a potential paramour at the bus stop.

I kiss the cold, white envelope / I press my lips against her name /
Two hundred words / We live in hope / The sky hangs heavy with rain

​Would those words from Nick Cave’s great romantic ballad “Love Letter” ever be phrased for an email or a text?   

Email has been a great substitute for the letter, but it’s not the same. As a teenager in the nineties I had a lot of pen pals and people I wrote to, but it tapered off as email took over in the oughts. I’ve corresponded with a lot of wonderful people over email too, but there is something different about the medium. Avid emailers haven’t really collected their email correspondence with others in the same way people used to collect letters and print them into books. As much as I’d like to read the collected emails of Rudy Rucker, say with his friend, fellow science-fiction writer, and sometime collaborator Bruce Sterling, I’m not sure such a thing will ever happen.  Maybe I just haven’t waited long enough for it to appear or perhaps there is already something like this out there that I just don’t know about. Maybe emailers don’t want to share their collected emails. Maybe they all got deleted. Maybe no one else cares.

            Yet when I wander the stacks hunting for old books (one of the perks of working at a library), I have found volume upon volume of correspondence between various writers, artists, musicians, politicians, scientists, socialites and regular people.  When I did a subject heading search for the term “correspondence,” I found 5,724 titles for books that contain people’s printed letters to each other. To me, this says something about where we have come from as an industrial society and one of the many things we have lost: the art and pleasure of writing letters to each other.

            This would be a good thing to regain. Among myriad other benefits, in deindustrial times it may be possible for a person to make a living, or at least a bit of side money or trade, by writing letters.  In Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s Cemetery of Forgotten Books quartet of novels, a man works the trade of letter writer for hire on the streets of Barcelona. He had the calling of a poet, but poetry has never paid the bills too well (though it can happen). With his poetic imagination, he helps those who are illiterate to compose beautiful language to captivate the heart of the beloved. Prisoners who have been talented at letter writing have often gotten protection from illiterate prisoners by writing letters for them to their old ladies on the outside, at least in fiction. Considering that literacy rates are liable to go down in the dark ages to come, the ability to craft a lovely letter can be considered a potentially formidable skill.

Alyson Hagy wrote a whole deindustrial book on this topic. Her novel Scribe is set in Appalachia after a second Civil War and contagious fevers have decimated the population of the United States. Barter and trade have replaced the once mighty dollar. The main character has become known for her skills in making paper, ink, and further, writing letters. These she trades for tobacco, firewood, and the scant other things she may need. Yet, there is a danger in her ability as well. Sometimes a letter can set off unforeseen events. There is a responsibility that comes with being a scribe.

Letter writing need not be a simple two-way exchange between people. It can also form the backbone of an analog network with multiple nodes.

Round Robins and Amateur Presses

 There is a lot of potential for round-robin mail to come into use to keep communities and families connected. During the Great Depression, many people, even if they had phone service, didn’t like to make long distance phone calls to stay in touch, except in case of emergency. Long distance used to be pretty expensive, and if you came from a big family, as more people did in the past, chances were you’d have a lot siblings to stay in touch with on both sides of a marriage. The postal service helped fill the void. Round-robin mail was a way for families to stay in touch and it often worked by a process of addition and subtraction. Every so often a package would arrive to a family filled with letters and pictures. You’d take your old letter out of the package, write a new one, add some pictures if you had them, and send it on to the next person in the mail circle. That person would take their old letter out, and fill up a new one with the latest news, and then send it along to the next in line.

It seems to me the round-robin style sharing of letters and other ephemera could be employed just as easily by a group of close-knit friends, members of fraternities, sororities, clubs, and societies who wanted to stay in touch. This round-robin style of sharing mail is an excellent example of an old-school, analog communications network. Something similar, though operated differently, and not explicitly for family, could also be used for groups who share an affinity around writing about a certain topic, say alchemy, amateur radio, retro pulp fiction, deindustrial living skills, or green wizardry. Another way to do it would be to set up an Amateur Press Association (APA) on the topic.

Many APA’s are still going even though it is now a niche hobby. The structure of an APA should be able to weather some of the convulsions to come. At its most simple an APA is a group of people who share mail with each other in bundles. Each member writes and then photocopies, mimeographs or duplicates in some way their contribution to a mail package that is sent to a Central Mailer (not to be confused with the central scrutinizer) to collate and send back out to all of the different members of the group. Say someone sets up a Green Wizards APA and it has fifty members. Then each person who contributes to that month’s bundle needs to run off fifty copies of their how-to guide for making beeswax candles and send it in to the Central Mailer, who then collates all the individual contributions into the bundle and sends a package back to each member. Some APA’s put every person’s contribution together into a zine, but the principle is the same. Often in an APA there are yearly dues or a membership fee that goes towards covering the cost of sending out the bundles by the Central Mailer.

I have been a member of two APAs, one large and one small. The large one is the American Amateur Press Association, AAPA, established in 1936, and was a split off from the National Amateur Press Association, formed in 1876, also still in existence. The AAPA had over 120 members when I last paid my dues. The smaller APA, Freedom APA, was by invitation only. It took its name from the fact that there was no theme and members were free to contribute anything they wanted to the bundles, which went out about three times a year.

The idea of whether or not an APA is open to the public, or closed to a smaller group brings up a key point. Depending on what the goals of the organizers are, it could go either way. Many APAs have been focused around genre literature, specifically science fiction and fantasy. A number of professional writers have participated in APAs, H.P. Lovecraft being one of the most famous. I think they have a lot of potential for connecting people who would otherwise be online chatting in forums about herbalism or classical music appreciation. If started small and by invitation only, they could grow, and then when the organizers have the operation figured out and running smoothly, they can start advertising their presence and invite others in to share in the joy of exchanging the written word.

Mail Art and Zines

Mail Art operates in a similar way to the APAs, and developed out of the Fluxus art movement and the work of Ray Johnson and his New York School of Correspondance in the 1960s. From there its tentacles dipped into the  industrial and punk music scenes and other fringeworthy subcultures. The practice is centered around sending small pieces of art through the post. These are often collages, block prints and rubber-stamp pieces, but also other mediums. The practice still has a small but loyal cult following around the world.

Works were created and sent out to lists of people. There were many Mail Art APAs where collected collages were collated by the Central Mailer and sent to everyone on the network. Yet there were looser Mail Art networks. Each Mail Artist would develop their own address book of contacts and send pieces out to who they chose. (Even if you don’t ever get into Mail Art, keeping an address book is useful to do. I don’t really happen to know how many people in the Millennial cohort or the Z generation who have and keep address books, but if a digital gizmo dies, it’s nice to have a hard-copy backup of people’s addresses and phone numbers.)

​Zines and underground newspapers offer another way for people to get to know each other across space when the absence of heavily subsidized oil transportation and internet connections start (continue) to go on the fritz. A PO Box or return address is often included in most zines, even if it is really just a mail drop. Many zines have included classifieds of a kind. These are often people looking to make contacts for their small touring band, trade with other zinesters, or other people looking for pen pals with shared interests. 

Postal Tradecraft

Another reason to think about corresponding over paper instead of over email is to minimize your digital footprint. Sure, the NSA already knows everything they want to know about you, if they want to know about you. But paper letters are harder to hack. Perhaps more importantly for your mental health, it is harder for advertisers to use your paper mail to spit customized ads back at you, unless the people who want to read your letters are also skilled in the tradecraft of spies. If that’s the case, you probably have bigger problems anyway.

Even so, there are times in life when secrecy in communication is required. For instance, you may have gone out and started your own shortwave pirate radio station. Or perhaps you’ve started a clandestine political organization. In the case of shortwave pirate radio, operators often really like receiving signal reports and other feedback from listeners. They need a way to communicate that avoids giving out their location, while still giving listeners a way to get in touch. Enter the mail drop.

In order to run a mail drop you need to find someone who is absolutely trustworthy and is willing to operate a PO Box. A PO Box is used so that a home address never needs to be given out, adding another layer of privacy and protection for the mail drop operator. The PO Box is revealed to the public, in the pages of a zine or over the air on a pirate radio show, for instance, or more strictly on a need-to-know basis. Those who want to get in touch write to the PO Box. The operator collects the mail from the box and forwards it to the person it really goes to, often to another PO Box, which again adds another level of privacy and protection.

It is useful to know that operating a mail drop, on behalf of a pirate station or for any other reason, is completely legal. There is nothing illegal about sending mail by a circuitous route to others.

If you do find yourself in a situation where you are sending out secret missives, then learn  to write lightly. Spies and snoops have been known to read the pages of a notebook below the one the ink was splashed on. If you are really under surveillance from Big Brother, Little Brother, and their friends, then you should always consider that everything you write will be read. Not to induce undue paranoia.

No less a spy than Allen Dulles noted, “When the post is used it will be advisable to act through post boxes; that is to say, people who will receive mail for you and pass it on. This ought to be their only function. They should not be part of the show. They will have to be chosen for personal friendship which they have with you or with one of your agents. The explanation you give them will depend on circumstances; the letters you give them must be apparently innocent ...  A phrase, signature or embodied code will give the message. The letter ought to be concocted in such fashion as to fit in with the recipient’s social background. The writer therefore ought to be given details of the post boxes assigned to them. An insipid letter is in itself precious. If however, a signature or phrase is sufficient to convey the message, then a card with greetings will do.”
 
Learning some tradecraft will of course be useful to political dissidents, but this kind of thing might also be useful for those in minority religions if things turn ugly with the rise of the second religiosity (e.g. lynchings, mobs, burnings at the stake). General chaos, people getting canceled, and other dastardly shenanigans may be other reasons for communicating in secret.​

An Artful Flourish

​If your interest in writing letters isn’t so clandestine, there are other aspects of it worthy of consideration with regards to a pleasant deindustrialized life. Consider penmanship. Mine is atrocious. Yet, it can be very fun to write in cursive, and a great joy for others to read. Practicing penmanship can be enhanced when bringing back the other kit of OG writers. I’m thinking here of the fountain pen. There is something ritualistic about writing with one. Loading the ink and cleaning the nib can prime the pump of words. Sitting down to write becomes very tactile. Typing, likewise, can be very physical and rhythmic. Letters banged out on typewriters are also fun for writer and reader.

Then consider stationery: elegant paper that has weight and texture. Something the words can gleam off of. The crafty deindustrial letter writer will probably be scheming of ways to make their own ink and paper like the character in Hagy’s book Scribe.  This would be in keeping with something ancient scribes knew how to do as part of their trade. Making ink and paper could turn into a side gig depending on how much you can make, how much other people need it, and what they would be willing to barter or buy it for. It’s certainly a worthy quill to put in one’s cap as far as skills go.
 
What will become of the world’s postal services is a good question. The United States’ postal service has been in rough shape, by various accounts, for a number of years. Whatever its exact future, it seems some kind of postal service can and will be organized in the future. It is certainly within the realm of the low-tech,and various forms of mail service have been around for hundreds of years, with ancient precedents going back to the couriers of the pharaohs of Egypt.

I guess that’s it for now. Here’s to many opportunities for putting your pen to scratching and setting those typewriter keys to clacking.

Sincerely,

Justin Patrick Moore

P.S. A slighty different version of this article appeared in an issue of the deindustrial fiction quarterly, New Maps.

RE/SOURCES:
There are numerous histories of postal services for various eras and regions of the world. I won’t list them all here, but something along those lines would be useful reading in the event the postal service needed reorganization, or for writers looking to write a postal-based deindustrial fiction story. There are also a lot of different books about how to make paper and ink, the art of fountain pens, and paeans to stationary. If this is an area of interest for you, I’m sure you’ll hunt down the ones that suit you best. Similarly, if the related pastime of stamp collecting is in your future, there are lots of titles about “the world’s most popular hobby” to get you started. For these re/sources I’ve focused on a few websites and books for APA’s, mail art, and two novels about post office workers.
 
American Amateur Press Association (AAPA). <https://www.aapainfo.org/>. Besides sharing monthly bundles of reading material, there are a lot of people involved in the AAPA who are into letterpress printing. It is a great resource for anyone who wants to get started going down that road.

Bukowski, Charles. Post Office. New York, NY.: Ecco Books, 2002, 1971. “It began as a mistake. It was Christmas season and I learned from the drunk up the hill who did the trick every Christmas, that they would hire damn near anybody, so I went and the next thing I knew I had this leather sack on my back and I was hiking around in my leisure.” Aren’t those lines one of the great openings in American letters? Your mileage may vary on that, and for this novel about a gambling alcoholic who becomes a mail clerk and his sordid misadventures along the way. Even with all the antics, it does give some color to the job of mail delivery.

Gallagher, Winifred. How the Post Office Created America: A History.  New York, N.Y.: Penguin Press, 2016.
Garfield-Perry Stamp Club. “Stamp Collecting 101: Philately: The Art of Stamp Collecting.” <http://garfieldperry.org/wp/learn-philately/class-overview/> This page includes a short twelve-lesson primer on the basics of the stamp-collecting hobby.

Hinchcliff, Jennie and Wheeler, Carolee Gilligan. Good Mail Day: A Primer For Making Eye-Popping Postal Art. Beverly, Massachusetts.: Quarry Books, 2009.

Pratchett, Terry. Going Postal. New York, N.Y.: HarperCollins, 2004. Pratchett isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, and I’ve only read a couple of his Discworld novels, of which this is one, but I thought I’d put it on this list as a fantasy humor alternative for those who might be put off by Bukowski’s shenanigans. This is a tail about “getting the moribund Postal Service up and running again…with literally mountains of decades-old undelivered mail clogging every nook and cranny of the broken-down post office building; and with only a few creaky old postmen and one rather unstable, pin-obsessed youth available to deliver it.”

National Amateur Press Association (NAPA) <https://amateurpress.org/> This is the oldest amateur press association in the world.

Srodes, James. “Allen Dulles’s 73 Rules of Spycraft.” Intelligencer: U.S. Journal of Intelligence Studies, Fall 2009, pp. 49–55. Available for download: <https://grugq.github.io/resources/Dulles%20on%20Tradecraft.pdf>
Welch, Chuck, editor. Eternal Network: A Mail Art Anthology. Calgary, Alta.: University of Calgary Press, 1995. Now out of print, but worth looking at, if you can find a copy, perhaps at a library. My institution has a copy, but it is very expensive now on the used market.

.:. .:. .:.

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