National Postal Museum, Part III: Artifacts

After passing through the lobby, where I learned about the history of the National Postal Museum itself, and meeting the characters that have played important roles in the history of the USPS, I explored the artifacts that make postal junkies eek with joy.

I'm not why, but the Postal Museum seems to have a large collection of artifacts and exhibits focusing on the Postal Service in the 1940s. Then again, it could just be my own personal interest filter, and I chose to pay most attention to displays from the WWII era.

The beautiful vehicle above is a mail delivery truck from the early 1940s. The truck, while very different from the trucks of today, was a dramatic improvement over the original automobiles put into service in 1899. In the first test run, through snow, the automobile completed a six hour route by horse in under two and a half hours.

In addition to this mail truck, the museum also has a walk through mail delivery train and a roped off Pony Express stagecoach, neither of which I took photos of. Sorry. Maybe this is evidence of the existence of the aforementioned personal interest filter...

Which brings me to this piece of ephemera. Above is an envelope that was mailed to James Farley, Postmaser General from 1933 to 1940, by his vacationing son. What interests me so much about this envelope isn't so much that it was forwarded to Farley in a classified location, but that the envelope appears to be from a collection of stationery from The Stone Tavern in Lake Spofford, New Hampshire. I'm a big fan of hotel stationery (I have a letterhead from Hotel Mecca in the image archive) and am sad that is has slowly gone out of fashion.

Close to the letter to Postmaser Farley is the above envelope. The reason this piece is significant is not because of the individuals that mailed or received it, but because of where it was processed. The envelope was processed through the Honolulu post office on December 7, 1941, the day of the of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

In front of the museum book store and the stamp store, there are rows of mail boxes from around the world. Some of these box styles are out of date, but many are still still in use in their respective countries, standing on corners, hanging from lamp posts and telephone poles.

Can you guess which countries these boxes hail from?

At the end of my museum visit, I spent a good amount of time in the museum bookstore. In many ways, the bookstore of the National Postal Museum is a continuance of the museum experience. There is a long wall of shelves, filled with books on letter writing, mail art, stamp collecting, and historical perspectives on correspondence. I took the picture above because two books caught my eye, Good Mail Day and Yours Ever, both of which have been big hits in the online letter writing community in the last year.

I purchased the above two items as souvenirs from my experience. The first is the book The Art of the Handwritten Letter. The author, Margaret Shepherd, focuses much more on the emotional, human side of letter writing, rather than the rules of etiquette, an attempt to persuade the reader to actually sit down, write, stamp and mail. She writes many great reflections on letter writing, some of which I will be using here, on Everyday Correspondence, in the coming months.

The bottom picture is of a first day issue stamp and envelope commemorating Freedom of the Press. The NPM store has a pleasant selection of first day issues, easily numbering in the hundreds for visitors to sort through. So, it wasn't difficult to find a first day issue with personal significance for me to purchase. I plan on framing it and hanging it in my printing studio (aka my living room).

I had a afternoon visiting the National Postal Museum. While neither very large nor heavily visited, the museum has lots to offer, especially for the postal enthusiast. After all, we're the type of people that just love reading placards, aren't we?

Yours Ever: A Book Review & Giveaway

Late last year I saw posts on a couple of other letter writing blogs about the new book by Thomas Mallon titled Yours Ever. The reviews were encouraging. So, when I was approached by Pantheon Books to do a review of the book and a giveaway here on Everyday Correspondence, I accepted the offer immediately. While there were no expectations of a positive review in my agreement with Pantheon, I still feel compelled to give Yours Ever strong marks.

The New York Times gave the book a good review for it's content, but Mallon's appreciation for the written letter aside, two things about the book struck me as both refreshing and unique. First, I appreciated Mallon's organization. Rather than taking the reader through a chronological journey of people and their letters over the years, Mallon organizes the chapters in Yours Ever by subject matter. In doing so, Mallon is able to draw connections between different approaches to delivering the same message. The organizational style also allows Mallon to analyze the impacts of technology on written correspondence. For example, in the chapter "Complaint," Mallon observes:

Sarcasm ("My dog left home when he heard I had voted for you") depends, in both the writer and the reader, on an appreciation of distortion. Paranoia has no time for such contrivances. It is terribly urgent, under the gun and ready to assert itself in ALL CAPS, which even now pack an unsettling punch when they show up in the pixels of angry e-mail - though nothing can be more upsetting than the slithering hate fax, whose paper seems to come, somehow, from the sender himself and not the recipient's own machine.

Mallon's acknowledgment of technological contributions to correspondence is the second point that made Yours Ever stand out to me. Mallon takes a more or less neutral position on the effects technology in the form of e-mail and texting have had on personal correspondence. Rather, he points out the positives and negatives, in the hopes of enriching the the reader's appreciation of correspondence in all forms. Before detailing the "lack of emotional affect to much e-mail," Mallon notes that while e-mail doesn't have sentimental intangibles like envelopes sealed with a kiss:

[E]lectronic mail has a few of its own oddball, endearing traits: the subject line that hangs around long past the point at which it has anything to do with what the correspondence is now discussing; the whimsical screen names that it shuttles between. Shipboard cable addresses, temporary handles for the transoceanic traveler, used to have something of the same charm. Jessica Mitford's was ELKSHATRACK, chosen after a friend told her "You need news from home like an elk needs a hat rack."

It is Mallon's organization and his treatment of technology that made Yours Ever a stand out read, for me. So, if you are looking for an entertaining account of correspondence from some of the world's most prolific figures and writers, without the "woe for the modern age and it's lack of good letters" attitude, then I recommend this book for you.

If the $26.95 price tag for the first run hardcover is a bit too much for your wallet at the moment, then I have good news! Pantheon Books is sponsoring a giveaway! Books may be shipped anywhere in the world, so this contest is open all readers of Everyday Correspondence.

Giveaway Rules:

1. Please, leave a comment after this post with your name and an e-mail address at which I can reach you should you be picked the winner of the giveaway. You may enter once in this fashion.

2. Additional entries may be had by tweeting about this giveaway and/or linking to this post from your website. Please leave an additional comment with a link to the tweet/post/website for each additional entry.

3. A winner will be randomly selected using the random number generator on Random.org at 1 PM EDT on Sunday, February 21, 2010. A short time later, the winner will be announced on Everyday Correspondence and the individual will be contacted by e-mail.

Best of luck to you all!

Yours ever,

James