In Praise of Paper Letters

They met by chance--he a tall, handsome Air Force man about to be discharged after WWII, and she a shy, brown-eyed bank teller hurrying to the post office on her lunch break. As the story goes, they fell in love at first sight, and would have married right away, had they not worried about what their families would think.

For the next eight months, they communicated through letters. She continued her work, and he enrolled in a university a few hundred miles away. They lived for weekends, when they would see each other again.

Their letters contain the loving expressions of two twenty-somethings, whose hopes and dreams were dancing on the horizon of their future. They exchanged memories of childhood, stories about their families, and dreamt about life together--dreams of having babies and finding work that satisfied. They discussed where they'd like to live after his university studies were complete.

By the time they married, they knew each other better than many couples today, because they communicated daily about what mattered most to them.

I don't know about you, but I love visiting used bookstores. On the Oregon coast there's a certain bookstore my husband and I always stop at when we're visiting Lincoln City. It's situated in a building that looks much tinier than it really is. Once inside, we're greeted by the resident fat cat, who is usually lying in a puddle of sunlight in his cozy kitty bed near the window.

The bookstore is built around seven or eight rooms, which wind through various levels of the building. A cookbook room is elevated to the left of the front door, antique books are at home around the checkout counter, back into a little nook, and everything else is straight ahead.

On this particular day, I headed towards the back of the main area, and discovered an old volume titled The World's Great Letters: From Ancient Days to our Own Times. The blurb inside reads: "Containing the characteristic and crucial communications, and intimate exchanges and cycles of correspondence, of many of the outstanding figures of world history, and some notable contemporaries, selected, edited, and integrated with biographical backgrounds and historical settings and consequences by M. Lincoln Schuster. (Whew! Are you exhausted yet?)

This book is filled with flowery prose, and for letter lovers like me, it's a treasure chest. These headings will give you a feel for the types of dramatic letters Schuster included in this book, copyrighted in 1940:

Benjamin Franklin Hurls His Defiance at an Old Comrade
Leonardo Da Vinci Asks the Duke of Milan for a Job
Charles Dickens Tells His Wife That Their Infant Daughter Has Died
Richard Wagner Demands a Loan of Ten Thousand Francs From One of His Admirers

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