By Carey Dunne, 23, reporting from New York, NY, on the power of the proper write, stamp and mail message
When was the last time you got a piece of real, non-e, snail-type personal mail? A picture postcard, or a letter on a live-forever sheet of stationery that you actually unfold? The sight of an old friend’s handwriting is something special. And how many friends’ handwriting do you even know these days?
Also, Facebook, email, texts, try as they might, will never outshine the thrill of ripping open an ivory envelope to discover that you have been formally invited to a ball, for instance. There is a reason ball invitations never come by way of Facebook: because stationery is better.
If I knew all of your addresses, you know I’d invite you that way—especially if I were hosting a ball—but for now, for here, your presence is requested in making this the summer of snail mail love.
Write to someone, like with a pen, on a postcard or a proper piece of stationery. Lick a stamp. (Stamp shopping in 2013 is no small pleasure, either: Muscle cars and Rosa Parks are forever!) Put it on an envelope. It will get to go in a truck, or on a plane. When it arrives in a friend’s mailbox, it will make their day much better than another email to slog through, or a little red number in their notifications tally. They will send something back to you, and you will thank your postal carrier, guardian of the hallowed tradition of letters.
I recently received a postcard from a good friend in Oakland, California, after she spent two weeks hibernating alone on a woods excursion. On the front, it had a black-and-white picture of elderly people drunkenly cavorting. On the back, she had drawn pictures of the raccoons she saw. Then I got a postcard from a friend with an illustration by David Shrigley called “The Lecture You Gave Was Not Well Received,” with pictures of little heads in a classroom yelling, “BORING,” “RUBBISH,” and “I WANT TO KILL YOU.” Take that, hyperlinked memes you click every day.
I’ve started making notecards with my own art by photocopying small (5x7) acrylic paintings on cardstock. Companies like Zazzle.com can cheaply print any image you like. I send sets of them to friends as gifts (which I hope also inspires them to write on them and send greetings to someone else).
Of course, there’s also every kind of pre-existing postcard and stationery set out there. Some excellent places to start are Polite Cards, publisher of the aforementioned David Shrigley card, along with many other original and funny artists’ work and most museum gift shops (I like this “Greetings from Brooklyn” set, perhaps guaranteed to intrigue a response out of the recipient if you’re sending from somewhere less obvious than that borough).
If you want to marvel at prices and how seriously some people take this stationery business, check out Dempsey and Carroll’s exquisite designs and engraving. You’ll see a personalized “silhouette: sand” set of notecards for $1,775. Before that drives you to bury your head in Facebook, consider that you can pick up a cheapie postcard with a picture of the beach on it, spring for the 33 cent stamp and wait for your friend to appreciate it on Instagram.