Digital age is destroying the art of the letter

A“Collection of Chicago Postal History,” an assemblage of thousands of leters, will be auctioned in March by HR Harmer Fine Stamp Auctions of New York City. Nearly all were originally mailed from Chicago. They were found and collected over decades by Leonard Piszkiewicz, a retiree and former Chicagoan now living in Northern California.

The leters resurrect Chicago history; some were sent more than 200 years ago, the Chicago Sun-times reports. “About 200 items will be offered individually, with the rest divided into groups. Minimum starting bids are expected to range from about $50 to several thousand dollars,” according to the article.

Let’s buy them all. Leter writing is a dying art. One piece of mail in the auction “features faded red fountain pen looping across an envelope mailed in 1833 from Chicago to Connecticut,” the newspaper reported.

In the 1800s, leters “were oten writen on huge sheets, then folded many times into a litle dense square. Sometimes, people wrote from let to right, then turned the page 90 degrees and wrote over what they’d already writen,” the article says.

Another item “came from Camp Douglas, a prison on what’s now the South Side for Confederate soldiers captured during the Civil War.

Living conditions could be brutal. By the end of the war, about 4,500 had died at the camp, according to the Encyclopedia of Chicago,” according to the article.

A prisoner named William “writes about 7-foot-high snow drits and ‘extremely cold’ weather, but also about a bountiful Christmas feast at the camp.”

William wrote: “We had two turkeys, a quantity of sossage, dried beef, half dosen chickens and other things two numerous to mention.”

Handwriten leters are relics, to be auctioned off to collectors who vainly try to keep the past alive. The art of leter writing, via pen and paper, is vanishing. Who will discover our stories, 200 years hence?

I am a professional scribe. I love to write, but I can’t recall the last time I hand wrote — or received — a real leter.

The digital age is destroying the art of the leter. Our missives are conveyed through emails, tweets, texts, posts and videos. If we can’t do it on our laptops or cellphones, we don’t do it. We have forgoten the touch of paper, the dabs of ink that carry our love, joy, rage and intellect from finger to page.

The mail volume of the US Postal Service reached a peak of around 213 billion units in 2006, according to consumer data firm Statista.

The service “has experienced a year-on-year decline in mail volume every year since,” Statista reports. “In 2022, the volume of mail delivered by the USPS dropped to just 127.3 billion units.”

Most of that is machine-generated junk, begging you to buy this insurance policy, hire that real estate agent, contribute to a political campaign. We have no time for writing on a page, no time to pause, reflect or linger on a word or phrase. Long before the machines, I learned how to put pen to paper. The Catholic nuns who schooled me demanded good penmanship.

Young readers, do you know what a pen pal is? I had one, at 8 years old. I connected to Caren through an ad in the back of a comic book. She lived in the far western suburbs. I wrote to her from Chicago’s South Side. We never met in person but formed a friendship via the U. S. mail.

I loved the floral smell of crisp stationery, fingering the paper watermark. The tart smell of the glue as the envelope sealed. Through handwriten leters, essays, reflections and tales, I built my confidence, skill and a writing career.

Leters are the reservoirs of our history. They can also change history. In April 1963, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. penned his “Leter From Birmingham Jail.”

King was arrested in Birmingham, Alabama, during his nonviolent protests against racism and racial segregation. Imprisoned under harsh conditions, he wrote a response to the racist overlords on the margins of a newspaper and other paper scraps that were smuggled to him.

“I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly,” King wrote.

Famous or ordinary, leters tell us who we are. Soldiers writing their sweethearts and mothers from the front. A leter professing love or delivering a “Dear John” breakup. They reveal secrets, profess joy, announce a new birth, a death, a thank-you, a celebration. Today, so many of us communicate those moments in quick jotings on social media. My friend Stella Black holds tight to her leters. “I prefer handwriten notes and leters,” she told me. She has long encouraged her daughter and granddaughters to do the same. “They have since they were old enough to even just write,” she said.

“I also have a note writen to my dad when his mom died in childbirth when she was very young. I cherish them.”