The Joy of Mail
And how I’ve recently rekindled it in my life. Plus a new raffle and still more stick figures in peril!
I’ve always loved mail. When I was a kid, it seemed like magic that you could scribble a name and address on an envelope, drop it in a box, and be fairly certain that it would arrive at its intended destination. And receiving mail felt like getting a surprise gift even though it wasn’t Christmas or your birthday. Just the sight of our local mailman approaching our house on his daily rounds was enough to get me excited.
When you enter adulthood, you learn that mail for grown-ups isn’t as much fun. Bills, fundraising appeals, government notifications, insurance forms — pfeh. Fortunately, I also became a zine publisher during my 20s, which was great from a postal perspective because email and electronic payments didn’t yet exist, so people would mail me fan letters, send me their own zines, send checks or well-concealed cash for back-issues and merch, and so on. I developed a near-Pavlovian pleasure response upon seeing a handwritten envelope in my daily stack of mail, because I knew it was probably zine-related mail instead of the boring grown-up mail. Mail still felt like magic.
A bit later, as I turned 30, I became a freelance journalist. Most magazines and websites in those days still paid their freelancers by mailing out paper checks, so any day could be payday! Yet another reason to be excited by the mailman’s daily approach.
Nowadays, of course, First Class mail has largely been supplanted by email, text messaging, and e-payments, but that hasn’t dimmed my fascination with all things postal. I have a section of a vintage mail chute mounted in my apartment, and over the past several years I’ve written about the history of mailbox design, a mailman who wears throwback postal uniforms, the wide range of “Return to Sender” pointing hand designs, and the design of Air Mail envelopes and security envelopes.
Still, mail as something to be actively enjoyed on a daily basis has largely faded from my life (and, I’m guessing, from yours). I still feel a little tingle of anticipation when our local letter carrier arrives each afternoon, but that tingle is now mostly muscle memory, and the daily delivery is almost always a disappointment. (Still, it could be worse: Denmark is preparing to end letter deliveries altogether!)
All of which leads me to a really great idea that my friend Rob Walker has come up with. As you may recall, he’s the guy behind The Art of Noticing, and we recently interviewed each other. Like me, Rob has paid subscribers and free subscribers; the latter group can read only the first few paragraphs of Rob’s paywalled posts. So he recently offered some of his free subscribers a deal: He would comp them a three-month paid subscription, and all they had to do was ask — by regular mail. A fun experiment, no?
And it worked! Rob received dozens of letters and postcards. As he recently wrote when describing this little project, “I can’t begin to describe how pleasing, how energizing, it was to get so much cool mail all at once.”
I loved this idea so much that I asked Rob if I could steal it, and he said sure. So a few weeks ago I sent a note to Inconspicuous Consumption free subscribers with a high rate of engagement (i.e., they open most of the emailed IC posts, even though they can read only the first few paragraphs) and offered to comp them a three-month paid sub as long as they made the request via a handwritten letter in a hand-addressed envelope. Using a typewriter was also acceptable. But no computer printers!