The Death of Epistolary Culture

[marcelo]

[storeynicholas]

The Sleepy Hollow. All Saints' Day 2008.

Dear Marcelo,
I just wrote you a reply here, suggesting that, although the falling into desuetude of proper letter writing is regrettable, the boon of communication over the internet should not be under-estimated but, as though to make a point, the internet lost my draft and I had to start again. Still, had the reply been on paper, one of the cats might have eaten it. Seriously though, 100 years ago my correspondence with family and friends back in the UK would have been confined to letters which took months to arrive each way but, as it is, I can see and speak to my parents every day on Skype.
yours ever,
Nicholas.

[pbc]

You are correct. During the summer I had to spend some time away from home and wrote postcards and letters to several of my family members and friends. It was a big hit. People loved getting a cordial, useful letter in the mail. Anything besides junk mail and bills is a pure delight. So I wrote more to more people and the response was the same. So many of my friends and neighbors went out of their way to call or tell me personally how much they appreciated it. Some referred to it as a lost art.

Several years ago I remember seeing a short story on the news of a local group building letter awareness or something of the like. They setup a table on the sidewalk and encouraged passers by to write a letter to an acquaintance. This group provided the paper, envelopes, pens, and postage. It seems they had a good amount of people interested and many did write letters to friends and family right there at the table. Once it was explained to them, everyone commented that they had neither sent nor received any letters for years, some never at all.

Along with the lack of letters is a lack of anything written. Notes, letters, greeting cards, etc. seem all but lost to email, blogs, cell phones, texting, and personal messaging. A secondary casualty is handwriting. Mine has certainly been nothing to write home about (pun intended) so I have been steadily improving it. That has spread a bit to my wife doing the same. I know they don't teach any form of penmanship in the schools any more, so children will need some encouragement as well. I miss the beautiful uniformity, even just legibility, of the previous generation's penmanship. At least it is easily practiced.

pbc

[RWS]

Letter writing was one of my relaxing pleasures. Then I entered into a career in which moments of repose are so few and so brief as to make my painstakingly slow writing(arising more from physical difficulty than from mental impairment, thank goodness) a nearly impossible indulgence. In an act of rebellion against the cheapening of life, however, I anticipate returning to letter- and other writing soon.

[ProfMoriarty]

You are, of course, correct in your observations Marcelo.
I am a new member and hesitate to share this, but here goes:
From the ages twenty-five to fifty, I was an elected official (in the USA). Most of that time I was single. Virtually every night (some Fridays and Saturdays "off") I wrote brief, personal handwritten notes to folks (constituents, financial supporters, "persons of influence") until I literally fell over asleep on my bed table. I would awake early the next morning, gather the previous night's correspondence together in a briefcase and begin another day. The briefcase was delivered to my secretary who copied and mailed each letter. The copy was filed away for future reference.
After I had been at it (elective politics) for about fifteen years, an area newspaper did a profile of me wherein a perennial opponent commented that he found it impossible to overcome what he called "the web of affection and loyalty (I) had built up" with people over the years. He even referred to what he characterized as my "obsession" with acknowledging every birth, death, graduation, marriage and promotion with one of my "infernal notes". It was then that I knew I had been doing (and would contine to do) the right thing.
The fact that so few folks write letters any more makes those few that are received (and those of us who send them) that much more appreciated. In the last few years I have been shocked and touched to find on more than one occasion one of my notes framed and hung on a wall or placed on a bureau or table. Invariabley those letters were either congratulatory or encouraging/consoling. [One of my letters to a financial supporter who had been jailed for fraud repledged my loyalty, friendship and support and quoted Nietzsche (a dangerous thing to do in a letter to an American federal prison, I know): "What does not destroy us will make us stronger" . I later learned that a copy of it and a picture of The Blessed Mother were the only things he hung on his jail cell wall. The original is on his desk to this day. He was later pardoned and rebuilt his life and fortune. He helped me build my professional career when I retired from politics. I have been told that he picks the frame up and hands it prospective clients of my firm, always to good effect.]
I don't even send standard Christmas or birthday cards. I send brief (three to five sentences) notes on stationary that you can buy at Staples (an office supply chain store) with a bit of seasonal green and red ink/decoration for much less than the cards that we are all inundated with and are so quickly forgotten.
I would encourage anyone who is inclined in this direction to take up the challenge. It would seem that the values that underly the interest in appropriate dress make folks here at thelondonlounge prime candidates to revive the lost art of letter writing. My godson has, since January, written three personal letters a week (many of his are typewritten; he suffers from the penmanship challenges pbc refers to). He continues to be shocked at the positive feedback both personally and in terms of his business life.
Best to all.
Jack

[Tucker Peterson]

I think some of the decline can be traced to the lack of penmanship of modern society. I unfortunately count myself in that untutored mass. One of my planned "self-improvement projects" for next year is to study penmanship. I am tired of my chicken scratch, though, as the son of a doctor, I at least have some claim to an inherited condition!

But to never have handwritten a letter to a would-be girlfriend? That astounds me! I just wrote a letter that induced a young lady to unbend her heart and take a chance on the likes of me and my inept ways...

Tucker

[marcelo]

If letter writing, as I have suggested, became an irrational or pointless activity, what to say of hand writing, scanning, and posting something which might as well have been directly written into the keyboard in the first instance. I did it in a quite Retrocentric spirit. I am glad to know that some fellow Loungers do share the sad feeling that letter writing has become a vanishing culture, though I did not have any intention to lambaste information technology as such. I would have saved a lot of Deutsch Marks if I had had something like Skype during the time I lived in Germany. But the point of letter writing, as I come to see it now, was as less concerned with the sheer conveyance of relevant information, as a the function of a Cartier consists in telling the right time, or a flannel suit in providing warmth. They have, so to speak, an existence of their own. The institution of hand writing was, at least in part, also inseparable from the very existence of Gentlemen’s clubs. The RAC had (has?) its own post office.

Would you prefer a broadband internet connection in lieu of the piece of furniture depicted bellow?

[kapellmeister]

As a keen collector and end user of fountain pens, I echo some of the sentiments regarding handwritten letters and notes. It is a lost art.And I certainly mean an art as the electronic ways of communication are indeed impersonal. I write between 10-30 letters a month to friends worldwide,giving them a small part of my life and possession.
Both forms of communication are acceptable yet one can be used when the power fails!
Sometimes the older forms are best and I will always use the post for letters.

If any here are interested in fountain pens,try www.fountainpennetwork.com

Best regards,

Jim

[Atlantic Sailor]

If any here are interested in fountain pens,try www.fountainpennetwork.com

Sir, a couple of years ago, I too would have wholeheartedly recommended that website as well. These days though, I find that it has degraded into a forum for the airing of the most ungentlemanly topics: disparaging of manufacturers (mostly Montblanc), U.S. politics and religion. The moderators unfortunately are not moderators so much as they are super users who post their opinions in topic threads and use moderation powers to steer the thread to their liking.

Might you know of another site where fountain pens are discussed in a more refined manner?

I've looked at PenTrace, but they seem to be concerned mostly with vintage pen photography and pen shows.

[Atlantic Sailor]

Gentlemen,

Can any of you recommend a good stationer from which to procure engraved stationery? I've looked at Dempsey & Carroll, Smythson and Piccolo Press but have minimal experience with their personalized products. Where do you buy your personalized flat cards and letter writing supplies?

[whittaker]

Smythson are beyond reproach. They have provided me with personalised products during my adult life.

[marcelo]

In UK, but they do not offer bespoke stationary anymore:
http://www.hazlitz.com/

In France:
http://www.mariepapier.fr/edito.htm

In Italy (beautiful shop):
http://www.ilpapirofirenze.it/


In NY:
http://www.katespaperie.com/

[Frog in Suit]

Stern Graveur, in Paris.

In late 2008, they unfortunately lost their old shop in the Passage des Panoramas, which was unchanged since they opened there in 1834, and listed as a Monument Historique. They engrave, inter alia, visiting cards, letterhead, announcements, etc, in whatever style, font, size, is desired. It is essentially a bespoke operation. Instead of an individual paper pattern, you have your own hand-engraved copper plate. if you need more, you just call or visit and they will send it.

The only information I have found is in French, but there may be other references in English:

http://www.sterngraveur.com/

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graveur_Stern

Frog in Suit

[sartorius]

To return to the original theme, it amazes me just how profound an effect technology has had on our lives and lifestyles in the last 20 years. Both good and bad.

On the one hand, as NJS has pointed out, we can now communicate instantaneously with friends and family all over the world. And yet the ease of communicating seems to have had the effect of making us all very lazy.

I worked in Australia for a year after leaving University in the early 90s. I still have all the letters written to me by friends and family in England while I was there. Most of them are several pages long - letter writing was a time consuming task requiring concentrated mental and physical endeavour, and so it was treated as a ritual to be invested with serious and meaningful effort. Now, most emails are no longer than a couple of sentences, and the fact that anyone can fire off an email to the far reaches of the globe has deprived the act of writing of its former significance. Email is largely superfluous and its content superficial in the extreme.

At the same time, the speed of communication, rather than making life easier, seems to have had the effect of forcing us simply to fit more into the day. 20 years ago you would write a business letter and be pleased to receive a response inside a week. Now, if you don't reply to an email within 20 minutes, clients assume you must be dead!

It is as well to remember, however, that technology on its own is not the culprit. It is those of us who use it who must shoulder the blame. You can write exactly what you would have written in a letter, in an email. It will be saved to your Sent Items for posterity, and the recipient will have their own copy as well. Work in progress can be saved automatically to Drafts. So, it seems to me that while the death of epistolary culture is a symptom of changing lifestyles, we should look for the cause within ourselves rather than in our computers.

[ProfMoriarty]

Gentlemen,

Can any of you recommend a good stationer from which to procure engraved stationery? I've looked at Dempsey & Carroll, Smythson and Piccolo Press but have minimal experience with their personalized products. Where do you buy your personalized flat cards and letter writing supplies?

Sailor: I note you are in U.S. For correspondence where I want to put my "best foot forward", I have stationary from Crane & Co. I am helpless at posting links, but they are American (based in Mass.) and have, to my knowledge, been the go to place for years for those who value quality in these matters. My experience is similar to the one outlined above by Frog in Suit; my "letterheads" have been engraved on copper plates and I order the stationary/paper/
cards, etc. accordingly (rag content/weight of paper, color, size, envelopes, etc.) Crane still makes the paper for U.S. currency, many of the world's bonds, securities, international currencies, etc. My understanding is that it still owned and operated by the Crane family and they take great pride in their personalized service. Many of the employees and most of the family have, by necessity due to some of the work they do, secured the highest security clearances from the U.S. government. (I know this as one of the then younger Cranes was known as a bit of a....shall we say....character who occasionally ran into local law enforcement while out and about...He "saw the light" when it was finally explained to him that he was endangering his chances at working in the family business by his extra cirricular activities; The matter was "continued without a finding" for a period and then it "disappeared". To his credit, his reputation now is that of someone who has learned his lesson well and works very hard at his craft and to the credit of his forebears.) If you want any details re contacting them or what they have, feel free to email me.
jack