20 Forgotten Tricks That Made Old Letters So Special

Before gummed envelopes, writers literally locked the letter itself to make it secure. They did this by folding the sheet and then cutting tiny slits through which a thin paper strip was run and then sealed. The letter could not be broken into without destroying it and leaving evidence. Even Queen Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots, had their own custom locking folds for their mail. It took conservator Jana Dambrogio and her team years of work, examining hundreds of thousands of preserved letters, to relearn how letterlocking worked.

When the Finnish author Tove Jansson, best known for creating the Moomin characters, sent impassioned love letters to her fellow theater professional Vivica Bandler in 1946, she frequently instructed her to burn them after reading. That command had been commonplace from the 18th century through to the middle of the 20th century, because people needed to safeguard the secrets in their correspondence, whether relating to their intimate affairs or politics and gossip. And yet, too often, the recipients of these letters disregarded the instruction and instead kept them. Today, there are libraries full of precious, intimate correspondence.

Before cheap photography took hold in the mid-19th century, the famously private American poet Emily Dickinson would often mail off a lock of her own hair to intimates. Friends and lovers across Europe and North America braided or knotted small locks with silk thread and tucked them into letters because hair doesn’t decay, offering an enduring connection at great distance. Hair exchange was not just a mourning practice but also one of courtship and daily life, exchanged by the living as easily as by the bereaved.

Before Great Britain overhauled its postal system in 1840, the cost of sending mail was based on the number of pages sent, not their weight. This meant that if you were Jane Austen or the poet John Keats, you could write a very long letter and only pay for one page. How? Just fill up a sheet with lines, turn the paper 90 degrees, and write another set of lines directly across the first. At first glance, it looks crowded with crisscrossing lines. But people back then were used to it, and they could read these letters just fine.

Before the early 1900s, people in Europe and America melted wax over folded paper to close a letter. They pressed a signet ring or private seal into the wax to indicate the sender’s identity. Business and official letters were sealed with red, mourning letters with black, and women used lighter hues for their personal letters.

After Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, died in 1861, she wore mourning clothes for the rest of her life, which made mourning stationery very popular. Grief letters were written on paper bordered by heavy black lines, mailed in black envelopes, and sealed with black wax. Formal mourning had several stages, and etiquette required the lines along the paper’s edge to get thinner as time passed, allowing the reader to know how far along the writer was in his or her mourning without even having to open the letter.

Mail often passed through many hands, including postmasters, couriers, and clerks, before it reached its destination, often without ever having been sealed. Both Founding Father Thomas Jefferson and Abigail Adams, the first lady who was married to John Adams, employed simple homemade substitution ciphers in their personal letters. A sender and receiver could agree on a code to encrypt personal information regarding their families, inheritances, and political views that they didn’t wish for anyone to read. But at this most elementary family level, the methods had little in common with military cryptography.

Florence Hartley’s 1860 etiquette book, The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette, warned that adding a postscript after the signature was rude, treating your correspondent as an afterthought. Other etiquette books agreed. Yet letter writers frequently ignored those warnings. They kept the main body of the letter suitably formal, while using the P.S. to add warmth and informality. Some added gossip, some included the latest news, providing any kind of detail that might have been forgotten or overlooked during the composition of the letter. In fact, for many writers, the postscript became a favorite escape hatch, a place to speak more candidly than etiquette allowed.

Scottish engineer James Watt, famous for his work on the steam engine, patented a copying press in 1780. A sheet of damp, thin tissue paper was placed against the newly written letter in an iron screw press. The result was a reversed copy on the tissue that had to be viewed from behind to read. Politicians like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson used the machine to produce books of their own letters.

The aerogramme was originally conceived by a postal official named Douglas Gumbley in Iraq in 1933 and standardized internationally by the Universal Postal Union in 1952. Made of paper that could be posted overseas as airmail, the sheet let you write on the inside and then fold it up into its own envelope, already gummed. You weren’t supposed to include another page or anything like a photo or an object, so everything you wanted to say had to fit on that one page.

Paper knives, long, flat blades with no sharpened edge, were commonplace items in European and North American homes in the 18th and 19th centuries. People used them to slit open mail and slice through the uncut pages of newly bound books. They could be fashioned from sterling silver, mother-of-pearl, ivory, or bone. It is odd now to think of one tool serving both purposes, yet at the time, it made perfect sense.

In Britain and North America, Victorians pressed flowers, ferns, or autumn leaves in the pages of big hardcover books, or hid them in envelopes. Certain plants held a special meaning: a red rose for love, forget-me-nots for memory. But often, there was no hidden meaning in these pressed plants at all. Many were simply tokens of a particular garden or location.

Between the 1880s and 1930s in Europe and North America, etiquette writers advised middle- and upper-class consumers to purchase custom-engraved metal dies. These could be pressed into high-quality paper stock to imprint raised letters or heraldic crests on the head portion of a sheet of stationery. Known as “blind embossing,” these uncolored but physical imprints were described by etiquette guides as the refined version of bright, garish printed letterheads.

Writers who ran out of room on a sheet but still had one more sentence to add, and didn’t want to bother with buying another sheet, could do what many others did in 18th- and 19th-century Europe and North America: write in the empty space along the left and right edges of the sheet, vertically. Though sometimes confused with cross-writing, the key difference here is that marginalia tends to be written in the white space around the body of the text rather than through it.

Before blotting paper became available in the mid-1800s, users of the slow-drying iron gall ink kept a small pounce pot on the desk. It contained finely ground cuttlefish bone, gum sandarac resin, or fine silica sand that was dusted over the still-wet ink, where it was absorbed within 10 seconds. After that, the writer just shook off the powder and folded up the letter.

For formal invitations, acceptances, or introductions in British and early American high society during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, one would never use “I” or “we.” The only acceptable way of making or acknowledging an introduction was in the third person, as in, “Mr. Thomas Jefferson presents his compliments to Mrs. Adams.” Such phrasing preserved a proper measure of reserve between casual acquaintances, while signaling closeness between closer friends.

From the medieval period to the end of the 19th century, the majority of clerks, merchants, and letter writers in Europe and North America ended their signatures with a paraph, a quick, elaborate scrawl of loops and knots that was part of the standard curriculum of penmanship methods like the Spencerian system. Though the paraph was decorative, the speed and precision with which it was drawn made it difficult to forge.

“Your most obedient and humble servant” was the valediction with which one might have ended a letter in the 17th, 18th, or 19th century. Far from being a simple cliché, however, the closing phrase had meaning; style books dictated specific terms of valediction depending on the recipient’s rank or position, his or her level of subordination, or the closeness of the relationship with them. The phrase didn’t actually mean literal servitude.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, ladies spritzed their letters with rosewater, lavender, or violet oil, or stored them in a cedar writing slope where they could absorb the essence of the wood. Etiquette books in the Victorian era divided scent guidelines strictly along gender lines. Men were instructed to use plain, unscented stationery, while women’s light floral notes were intended to evoke sensory memory and intimacy in the recipient who opened the letter.

Etiquette writer M.A. Baines laid out the two-day reply rule in 1885 in the British magazine The Girl’s Own Paper, warning that leaving a note unanswered for more than two days was a great insult. In 19th-century Britain and North America, etiquette books treated letter-writing as a social obligation, so a thoughtful response was expected within a day or two.

This content was created with the help of AI.