Recently we featured the blog-turned-book, Letters of Note, an eclectic archive of correspondence from both the famous and unknown. Andrea Denhoed recently talked to Shaun Usher, the project’s mastermind, offering a glimpse of how it all works:
The success of “Letters of Note” is certainly a tribute to the charm of written correspondence,
but it’s also evidence of the value of a supportive spouse—Usher’s wife, who was working as a manager for a cosmetics company, supported the family alone for most of two years before his work became profitable—and the indispensability of tireless trench work. These days, Usher receives a steady flow of submissions and has connections with a number of archivists. Starting out, however, there was much more digging involved. He says, “In those days … I’d get a list of famous people and I’d type into Google, I don’t know, ‘Stan Laurel letter’ and I’d literally just search about Google to see what I could find. And it worked to an extent.” His first letter to go viral was found this way, several pages into the search results. It’s an unusually kind and lengthy letter to a young fan from John Kricfalusi, the creator of the cartoon “Ren and Stimpy.” It included sketches, encouragement (“Alright Bastard, let’s get to work. Draw!”) and practical cartooning advice (“Learn how to draw hands.”)
The project’s popularity, however, has brought its own frustrations:
Usher estimates that he reads at least twenty unusable letters for each one that he ends up including. He says, “I’ve bought hundreds of books purely to find one letter I just had a hunch might be in there.” With his success, a new problem has cropped up: he also receives a huge number of unusable submissions. He’s been sent a few, he says, that are too scandalous to post. “It’s so frustrating,” he says. But “I’d get sued pretty quickly.” Far more often, he gets “very personal letters—from their grandma, or their grandpa … and it’s this very lovely letter. But I receive so many of them, and I’ve seen them so many times that they’re not …” He trails off, like he can’t quite bring himself to say that these precious family heirlooms can be boring. “I have to write some very tactful rejection letters.”
The idea behind the Letters of Note project—that correspondence holds a rare communicative and aesthetic power—also happens to be well calibrated for the Internet. It hits on a juncture of Pinterest-style object nostalgia, an appetite for emotive but bite-size reading, and a mild voyeurism. Usher points out the irony that “the very service that’s going to kill off letter writing” is responsible for bringing these missives before so many eyes.
(Image: Page from John Kricfalusi’s letter via Letters of Note)
The Dish 