The Friday Fillip: Letters, We Got Letters

Hey, you greyheads, remember back in the day? You wrote letters. Or, if you were lazy, you read letters that others wrote to you. Now, for those of you who still have a spring in your step after you go walking, let me elaborate: the national service that now brings flyers and the occasional bill to your door would once upon a time bring you news from friends and relations, a kind of Facebook on feet, if you will. Often these epistolary efforts were longer than emails, done in a personal cursive, and, as a bonus they never needed to be printed out. But, as the saying goes, “Nous avons changé tout cela.”

Yet, the web, hungrier for content than even TV, has taken to circling back to an earlier time. The site I want to point you to today, no matter the age of your hair or the size of your spring, is one such. Letters of Note presents you with more than 600 writings once mailed to people, letters that may be from famous folk or that give you an intimate glimpse of history. Thus, for instance, there’s a letter by Charles Bukowski written to a reader who had told him that the library in Nijmegen had removed one of his books from their shelves, and a 1909 letter from Okhil Chandra Sen written to the railway office in West Bengal detailing the disastrous consequence of the lack of toilets on the trains, which letter was the stimulus needed to introduce those conveniences on Indian trains.

The original missives are shown — and, typically, transcribed into plain text as well. To help you through this stack of correspondence, there’s a list in the sidebar of the most popular letters and an archive that lets you filter in a variety of ways: by writing method, date, topic, author etc. The site could use a “Random Letter” button. Sometimes it’s hard to pull the trigger when faced with so many choices. But do stab about. I think you’ll be surprised and pleased.