Letter (message)

Archives of correspondence, whether for personal, diplomatic, or business reasons, serve as primary sources for historians.

At certain times, the writing of letters was thought to be an art form and a genre of literature, for instance in Byzantine epistolography.

[4] In the ancient world letters might be written on various different materials, including metal, lead, wax-coated wooden tablets, pottery fragments, animal skin, and papyrus.

[6] Historians of the medieval period often study family letter collections, which gather the personal and business correspondence of a group of related people and shed light on their daily life.

The Paston Letters (1425 – 1520 CE) are widely studied for insight into life in Britain during the Wars of the Roses.

Even in the era of telegrams and telephones, letters remained quite important until fax and email further eroded their primacy, especially since the turn of the 21st century.

At the telegraph office closest to the destination, the signal was converted back into writing on paper and delivered to the recipient.

Then followed the fax (facsimile) machine: a letter could be transferred from the sender to the receiver through the telephone network as an image.

As a medium of writing that lies ambiguously between the public and private worlds, letters provide an appealing peek into other people's thoughts, feelings, and lives.

During this historical period, publishing these "private" letters so they could build and preserve literary prominence became common for the first time.

Researchers interested in the links and connections between migrants, settlers, and refugees have increasingly concentrated on letters and their purposes.

Surprisingly, academics only began examining letters as artifacts in the late twentieth century; most studies continue to focus on the national course of epistolary novels.

[9][10] Letters also offer information on changing conceptions of privacy, secrecy, and trust during a period of widespread censorship, especially in war.

[11][12] Alexander Pope was the first English writer to publish from his own letters during his lifetime, putting out a new example for authors and other important people's epistolary works.

In 2008, Janet Barrett in the UK received an RSVP to a party invitation addressed to 'Percy Bateman', from 'Buffy', allegedly originally posted on 29 November 1919.

[15] However, Royal Mail denied this, saying that it would be impossible for a letter to have remained in their system for so long, as checks are carried out regularly.

Typists were required to follow dozens or hundreds of rules about element placement and sizing, some of them with rather arbitrary and even counterproductive (wastefully expensive) strictness.

However, the effort to standardize (on where to put the information and how to represent it) did have various valid motivations, as in some respects it presaged the concept of data normalization, helping with the extensive manual indexing, cataloguing, and filing that characterized the clerking duties of the era.

Over the centuries, a lexicon of abbreviations, metonymic short forms, and conventional valedictions developed for frequent use in letters.

A general theme of the diplomatic mail pouch is that outsiders never have physical access to it during the entire chain of custody; it never gets sent off out of sight of authorized persons, which would otherwise be the weak link in the chain where intelligence agencies could surreptitiously examine it in non-evident ways.