☞ A Deep Dive on the “Return to Sender” Pointing Hand ☜
This familiar symbol has featured a surprising number of design variations over the years.
Editor’s Note: This post includes discussion of fairly small visual details. If possible, you’ll be better off reading it on a computer, not on your phone. And no matter which device you use, you’ll also be better off reading the web version instead of the emailed version. Enjoy! — Paul
A few months ago I received an email from reader Mike Ortman, who lives in Mexico. He had recently mailed two letters that the Mexican postal service was unable to deliver for whatever reason, so the letters were returned to him, emblazoned with the familiar rubber-stamped image of a hand pointing at the return address, along with the word “Devuelvase,” which means “Return” or “Come Back” — the Spanish equivalent of “Return to Sender.”
The thing Mike found interesting, and the reason he therefore got in touch with me, is that the two rubber-stamped images showed two distinct hand renderings.
“The first one is kind of a spartan silhouette,” Mike said in his email to me. “But the second one has an elaborate cuff and a rather detailed manicure.” I’ll go further and note that the first one is a right hand and the second one is a left hand! (As you all know by now, I’m very attuned to lefty/righty issues.)
And thus began my descent into the surprisingly complicated world of “Return to Sender” graphics — a classically inconspicuous topic if ever there was one. I was certainly familiar with the official-looking pointing hand, but I had intuitively assumed that it was always the same standardized symbol. It hadn’t occurred to me that there might be multiple versions of it (or, for that matter, that it was used by postal systems outside the United States).
After a bunch of research, I’ve learned a lot about this topic. Let’s start with the most obvious question: When did pointing hands begin appearing on mail? We don’t have a definitive answer to that question, but we do know that the earliest pointing hands on letters had nothing to do with returning anything to its sender and were instead used to highlight some other marking on the envelope. Prior to the introduction of postage stamps in 1847, for example, a posted letter would often be marked “PAID” — sometimes accompanied by a pointing hand. The earliest known example of this dates back to 1796! (Additional examples and info here.)
But when did the pointing hand become associated with “Return to Sender”? Again, there’s no exact date available, but it appears that the key development on this front was a piece of federal legislation called the “Act in Relation to the Return of Undeliverable Letters in the Post Office,” which was passed by Congress in 1860. It reads: