Posts Tagged ‘letters’

Messy letters

Posted March 28, 2012 by
in Beautiful Creations, Cabinet of Curiosities, Pens, Paper & People | 1 comment »

Well, this is appropriate timing… I’ve been reading Janet Malcolm’s excellent book about Sylvia Plath, The Silent Woman, and a day after I blogged about handwritten fonts, I reached a passage where Malcolm describes a pack of letters from Plath’s husband, Ted Hughes, to the poet and biographer Anne Stevenson:

As I looked at the pages of dense, single-spaced typing, punctuated by x-ings-out and penned-in corrections, I had a nostalgic feeling. The clotted, irregular, unrepentantly messy pages brought back the letters we used to write one another in the 1950s and ’60s on our manual Olivettis and Smith Coronas, so different from the marmoreally cool and smooth letters young people write one another today on their Macintoshes and IBMs.

These days, I guess we’re just syntactically messy.

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Letters in the mail

Posted January 13, 2012 by
in Beautiful Creations, Cabinet of Curiosities | Add your comment »

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!

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Snail mail my email

Posted August 8, 2011 by
in Cabinet of Curiosities, Pens, Paper & People | 3 comments »

Via our product manager, Ceclia, and the Pen Boutique Facebook page comes word of an interesting new project. As you might expect from the name — Snail Mail My Email — it enables people to email a message to the project’s volunteers, who then write it out by hand and mail it to the recipient.

Ivan Cash, the San Francisco designer and art director who founded SMME, sees it as a “jumpstart to help raise awareness,” according to this CNN article. Personally, I think it’s more interesting for as a bit of creative conceptual art, but the response has been fairly impressive: the team now has 134 international volunteers and has sent thousands of letters.

If you want to participate, email your letter to snailmailmyemail@gmail.com before August 15.

(Or, you know, break out a pen and show off the quirks of your own handwriting.)

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Write to history

Posted August 4, 2011 by
in Cabinet of Curiosities | Add your comment »

Another thing from France that I’ve been meaning to share for a while is this post about the site Dialogus, where you can discuss, ask questions, and engage in a fictive dialogue with historical figures like Marie Antoinette and John F. Kennedy (who answers in perfect French) as well as fictional characters like Emma Bovary and Peter Pan. “Who are you?” someone asked Lolita. “I’m not really sure how to answer that,” she responded.

I’m not aware of anything like this in the US, but it strikes me that this is the Internet at its best — engaging, educational, and diverting in the best sense. If you speak French (or, like me, muddle through), I highly recommend it. There are a few letters in English, too, though the answers strike me as somewhat less spirited.

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A letter in Larmes de Cassis

Posted February 17, 2011 by
in Beautiful Creations, Pens, Paper & People, Product Reviews | 1 comment »

Thanks to contest winner Annie for sending us a picture of this lovely handwritten note! A great description of Larmes de Cassis, too: “like the stain you would get if you dropped a piece of blueberry pie onto a white shirt.”

(And yes, I do know the color of that stain. Why do you ask?)

Click through to see the full-sized letter…

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Do you send holiday cards?

Posted December 21, 2010 by
in Editorial, Pens, Paper & People | 13 comments »

Image by Karen Tucker

Much like my mother (and who knows, maybe my grandmother, too), I never got into the habit of sending out holiday cards. For a while, among acquaintances at least, that put me in the minority. Now, if anecdotal evidence is to be believed, I’ve got lots of company.

Of course, there are plenty of alternatives, e-cards among the most prominent. I don’t send them, either. For some reason, in spite of the fact that I like to write and receive real letters, I can’t seem to send more than a handful of cards in any given year. And this year, I was so busy that I (gasp) didn’t send any at all. Aside from laziness, I guess I’d say that I’m conflicted about whether or not a card is the best way to get in touch with people to whom I really owe a letter or a long personal email, or whether it’s appreciated by all but my most far-flung friends and relatives.

Do you send holiday cards?

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Letter openers

Posted April 21, 2009 by
in Pens, Paper & People | 6 comments »

letter-opener

When I stopped by Art Brown the other day to pick up some fountain pen supplies, I obviously couldn’t resist having a look around, and I ended up buying something that’s been on my mind for a while: a letter opener. I used to think these were nice, but inessential (and like most city dwellers, I try not to keep too much inessential stuff around the house). Then a couple of weeks ago, I opened an envelope that was taped shut at the top, and almost tore the letter inside.

The carved metal models were cool, but in the end I opted for a light curved wood design. Pretty, right? I figure it might save me a few fingernails, as well.

Do you use a letter opener?

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Fountain pen friendly stationery

Posted March 10, 2009 by
in Pens, Paper & People | 9 comments »

lalo-newsweek

If, as the trend-spotters say, letter writing is making a comeback, I suppose it’s no surprise that our sister company, G. Lalo, was featured recently in a Newsweek roundup of fountain pen-friendly stationery.

I know that many of our you use fountain pens to write on our planners and on Clairefontaine and Rhodia notebooks. Do you ever use them on proper stationery? Karen sent me some blank verge cards last year, which I’ve slowly been going through for thank you notes and special occasions. Using a fountain pen would just make it feel all the more special. Still, I’m not sure I’m ready for a proper “from the desk of” sort of thing…

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The art of hand-written letters

Posted February 13, 2009 by
in Editorial, Pens, Paper & People | 4 comments »

hands

Did anyone else see the Telegraph piece about a resurgence in hand-written letters? I was intrigued, though my own letter-writing habits hardly substantiate the trend. Until a couple years ago, I had a few far-flung friends with whom I still exchanged letters. Now, we pretty much all rely exclusively on email. (Which needn’t be curt and unthoughtful, by the way!)

Do I miss writing letters? In the abstract, sure. There’s also nothing better than receiving a real letter from someone you care about. But I don’t expect my habits will change anytime soon… email is just too convenient.

Do you write letters? To whom, and how frequently?

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