On the heels of Snail Mail My Email, Dialogus, and the many pen pal match-making sites comes a new initiative called Letters In The Mail.

Through it, people can subscribe to receive weekly letters from writers like Dave Eggers, Margaret Cho, and Jonathan Ames. (The cost is $5 a month, and each subscriber gets the same letter.)

“I got this urge to get back to sending paper letters, and I also knew a lot of authors who I knew would be really excited about it,” founder Stephen Elliott told MSNBC.

If the author decides to include his or her return address, participants are encouraged to write back.

Thanks to Cecilia for passing this on!

I was poking around online when I came across an old post by needlepoint blogger Cynthia. Cynthia sells her designs online at The Drawn Thread; as it turns out, she’s also a fan of the Note 27, and even stitched her own cover for it!

Pictured above and available for sale here, the cover is a perfect complement to the planner, and every bit its aesthetic equal.

Though the angle of the sun conspired against my cell-phone picture taking efforts, this lobster trap Christmas tree — at Lee’s Market in Westport, MA — seemed like the perfect follow-up to the book tree Cecilia found earlier, and in the spirit of the not-quite-gone season, I figured I’d post it here.

Hope your holidays were joyful!

From Cecilia, our product manager and finder-in-chief of cool stuff on the Internet, comes this amazing Christmas tree at Beck’s Book Store in Evanston, IL.

What’s particularly great about this idea to my space-starved urban eye is the fact that you can pack it up at the end of the season by putting the books back on their shelves. A, er, novel approach, dare I say!

From my French counterpart, Murielle, comes this post about Jitesh Patel, an amazing London-based paper artist — sculptor, I might say. As Murielle explains:

Jitesh Patel founded his studio in London in 2007. The artist works on paper in the form of multifaceted 3D creations and with a resolutely graphical style. A feast for the eyes, these achievements offer the ultimate results in advertisements for the Alpina Yogurt as well as in the streets of London.

You can see one of Patel’s street art projects in the image above; to see the intricate paper birds and butterflies he crafted for Alpina and learn more about his work, check out his website.

The Lewis Chessmen were discovered in 1831 on the Isle of Lewis in Scotland’s chilly Outer Hebrides. There are a bunch of stories about them: they were buried by a shipwrecked sailor, who was murdered by a herdsman, or they were stolen by a boy who jumped ship who buried them and meant to come back but never did.  Carved mostly from walrus tusk, they were found in a sand dune in a small stone carrying case. Some were stained red, indicating the colors of the sides were red and white, not black and white.

How they got to that sand dune is a mystery.  Some think they arrived from Iceland, but conventional wisdom  has it that they somehow came off a merchant ship traveling a regular trade route between Norway and Ireland and that they were produced in Trondheim, a Norwegian town, between 1150 and 1200. The faces are generally stylized, but each is different enough that some scholars have speculated they might portray real people.  Some of the expressions are certainly comic.

The archbishop of Trondheim, who along with the king of Norway had jurisdiction over the Hebrides, may have been the wealthy patron behind the chessmen.  He may have had them made as gifts, based on the cost of the ivory and the quality of the carving.

But two chess aficionados from Iceland, Gudmundur G. Thorarinsson and Einar S. Einarsson, are pushing Iceland as the birthplace of the chessmen. Mr. Thorarinsson createded a website to explain his theory –http://leit.is

Here it is:  Icelandic is the first language to describe “Bishop” as a chess piece. The use of bishops in chess is mentioned as far back as the Icelandic sagas from the 10th and 11th centuries–predating the chessmen. The sagas even include descriptions of checkmates using bishops.

Mr. Thorarinsson says historic writings refer to Bishop Pall Jonsson (1155 – 1211) in Iceland sending carved gifts made from tusks. These were made by Margret the Adroit, his wife, so called because of her prodigious skill at carving walrus tusks.

He added: “One might even entertain the notion that the Lewis Chessmen were made at the request of Bishop Pll of Sklholt and carved by Margrt the Adroit whose carving skills were the stuff of legend.”The pieces were then sent abroad for sale or as a gift, but the ship was then lost”.

Chess fans and mystery buffs – what’s your theory?

I watched a documentary over the weekend that German filmmaker Werner Herzog made about his relationship with the actor Klaus Kinski. To call the relationship tempestuous would be an understatement, and it’s a remarkable thing to watch. (For a brief glimpse, check out the trailer on YouTube.)

Also remarkable was a scene with actress Claudia Cardinale, who recalled, among other things, the notebook Herzog carried with him while they filming Fitzcarraldo. Kinski was suspicious of it, because, as Cardinale pointed out, it didn’t concern him, and he never knew what Herzog was writing. Of course, neither did anybody else, because — talk about tiny writing! Just get a load of the screenshot above and try to decipher the text.

Here in the US, it’s become something of a national pastime to marvel at how commercialized our holidays have become, and cluck our tongues as the stores set out their Halloween/Thanksgiving/Hanukkah-and-Christmas displays earlier and earlier.

On some occasions, though, it doesn’t hurt to get a head start. One of my aunts, continuing a tradition my grandparents began, always sends a box of German Lebkuchen around this time of year; the cookies last well through December and I am very happy to have them.

I’m also glad to have the decorative storage tins they come in, which I hoard for various purposes. Most years, the tins feature some sort of traditional winter cityscape (cathedrals, snow). This year, I got a special “Artist’s Chest” with a painting by Egon Schiele. I can’t think of a better place to put my fountain pen inks, which are currently stacked loose on a shelf.

How early do your holidays start?

I’ve just begun Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came To The End, a hilarious and well-observed account of office life at an ad agency in Chicago in the nineties. After pointing out that Ferris is apparently a Rhodia fan (here’s a great interview about his writing habits), I’d like to share the following passage about a manager and his day planner:

Joe showed up to the double meeting carrying his day planner, which was predictable and annoying. We were irked by the steadfast familiarity of that goddamn day planner. Sometimes we almost thought we could like Joe if just one time out of ten he left that leather-bound diary behind at his desk. But no.

I spend a lot of time erasing since I am always adding and subtracting events and memos in my Sapa X Equology.  Always on the lookout for an alternative to my Pink Pearls and arrowheads (remember those from school!) I came upon these fun Japanese erasers at Pencil Things.  Made by IWAKO, my favorites are the whales, squid and fugu blow fish from “Sea Life.” The problem is… I would probably not use them to erase!

Click here to see more at Pencil Things.