Did people collect their own outgoing letters?

November 30, 2020 8:39 PM

I save almost everything friends send me, so that is a nice record of their letters. Libraries collects people's "letters." In the past, did people just keep/make a copy of any letter they sent? Did they only do it if they had a weird high regard for themselves? Did other people send in the other half of their letters later? Has anyone gone through, like, their dead parent's papers and found copies of letters they had sent? Do you keep your own outgoing mail somehow? In general, how did this work, and in specific, is it weird to keep a photograph of a postcard I drew for a friend, or should it be ephemeral? Help, historians and librarians; you're my only hope.
posted by lauranesson to Writing & Language (18 answers total)

Not a historian or a librarian, but to answer the question "do you keep your own outgoing mail somehow?" I used to type letters to my grandmother when she was elderly, partly because I hate writing by hand, and also because I could enlarge the font for her to see better. So I saved my outgoing letters to her in a file on my computer, thinking I may reread them someday. She wasn't able to write back but she did occasionally send me letters a friend had written to her (they had Bible stuff on them she wanted me to read) and I do think I still have those in a drawer somewhere.

I would definitely keep a photo of a postcard I drew. If I send any artwork out into the world, I'd like to have a photo in case I want to revisit it from time to time.
posted by Serene Empress Dork at 8:46 PM on November 30, 2020 [2 favorites]

When letters were handwritten and postage was expensive, it wasn’t unusual to write and edit a rough draft and keep that to interleave with the replies. It was a hassle but how else would you keep track?

When people in novels and biographies spend mornings, plural, every week, writing their letters, this is part of why. Lots of writing furniture, too, from slanted boards to whole fancy desks.
posted by clew at 8:58 PM on November 30, 2020 [9 favorites]

Some people and institutions kept "Out-Letter Books", which contained rough copies of letters that were sent out. Do a Google search for "out-letter book" (in quotes) and you'll find a few.
posted by CrunchyFrog at 9:04 PM on November 30, 2020 [6 favorites]

I have occasionally sent very personal, heartfelt, handwritten cards, enough to squeeze onto a normal blank greeting card including both inside sides and sometimes the back. In those cases I took pictures of what I wrote. They were just personal and I wanted to remember what I said. I’ve also typed letters to family members and kept them on my computer. In one case these were occasional back and forths spanning a few years and it was nice to have the full record to read later.
posted by sillysally at 9:20 PM on November 30, 2020

When I was young and typed letters for other people, we would type letters on carbon so we could have duplicates for our records. Now we would just print extra copies.
posted by fiercekitten at 9:21 PM on November 30, 2020 [3 favorites]

Archivist here, answering part of your question: people used to keep carbon copies of typed letters, but a lot of the time an archival collection will only contain half of a correspondence. If you’re lucky, the other correspondent will have donated their materials to the same archives.
posted by thesmallmachine at 9:32 PM on November 30, 2020 [13 favorites]

I vaguely recall reading about something like a book of carbon paper sets, where you would write a letter, tear out the original to send, and have a copy in the book for yourself. I was googling around to refresh my memory and found a lot of variations of "letter copying books" and methods that involved carbon paper or copying ink. It looks like there's plenty of scholarly work on the subject that you could dig in to.

Personally, I keep copies of pretty much everything, especially since I'm of the age where almost all of my correspondence has been online and digital storage is cheap. I used to archive things almost compulsively, which was definitely related to an unhealthy habit of revisiting and ruminating on old relationships. In recent years, I've tried to let things go more, although it helps that so much of our digital life is frictionlessly saved anyhow (for better or for worse). Now it's a nice thing to occasionally remember a moment and go back and reread it, like when Facebook or Google remind you of photos that you took a year, two years, three years ago. I don't go so far as to document every physical letter or card I send out, but I will snap a photo of any artwork if it's not a photograph or print that I have another copy of.
posted by yeahlikethat at 9:35 PM on November 30, 2020 [1 favorite]

I asked a similar question about five years ago! Some of those answers may be helpful, and I look forward to reading new ones.
posted by brentajones at 10:57 PM on November 30, 2020 [1 favorite]

My late grandmother typed both her personal and professional correspondence, and kept carbon copies.
posted by ellenaim at 11:47 PM on November 30, 2020

Thomas Jefferson had a contraption that allowed him to copy a letter to another piece of paper while the ink was still wet. It’s on display at Monticello.
posted by brujita at 12:18 AM on December 1, 2020

I have worked extensively in early and mid-20th century archives of correspondence between famous early ethnomusicologists. Most of them had secretaries, it seems. Because yes it was a general habit for academics and para-academics to keep carbon duplicates of their outgoing professional correspondence and it’s a godsend to a researcher.
posted by spitbull at 1:57 AM on December 1, 2020 [2 favorites]

Thomas Jefferson had a contraption that allowed him to copy a letter to another piece of paper while the ink was still wet.

It was actually a device that wrote a copy of his letter at the same time he did - his pen would be hooked up to the contraption, the contraption held another pen and duplicated his pen movements over another sheet of paper.
posted by LionIndex at 3:39 AM on December 1, 2020 [2 favorites]

Yep. The term "indelible pencil" turns up in a bunch of late 19th - early 20th century literature, usually associated with humdrum ledger-work or encountering an annoying jobsworth. These were also known as "copying pencils", and featured a core that had a dye mixed in with the normal clay and graphite. The dye was usually the alarmingly toxic aniline purple, most likely the source of the school-yard stories of someone getting "lead" under their skin and losing a limb.

You could write a letter with a copying pencil (even erasing mistakes, if you were very careful not to leave any crumbs) then press it into a copying book of thin paper, the open sheet of which had been slightly dampened. This left a reversed purplish image in the copying book that could be read from the other side of the page. The pressing and damp would also fix the image in the letter: almost nothing will erase aniline. This process is detailed in the link I gave above.

Although copying books are long gone, copying pencils still find use in tattooing for marking out designs. The same dye technology was used in Banda/Ditto duplicators, and some tattoo artists used duplicator stencils for marking out. I went on a copying pencil / jelly duplicator toot a few years back and I'm still finding corners of my workbench infected with tiny copying pencil lead crumbs that bloom into huge purple stains if touched by a damp cloth.
posted by scruss at 6:47 AM on December 1, 2020 [5 favorites]

Not exactly what you are asking about, but my family is in the process of transcribing a set of letters between my grandmother and my grandfather while he was deployed in wwii and in the fifties. She wrote to him, he saved the letters, she saved his, and when they were reunited all of them went into one big shoebox together.
posted by bq at 8:46 AM on December 1, 2020

I'm going to recommend Galileo's Daughter, an unfortunately one-sided account of the correspondence between Galileo and his daughter, a nun. The correspondence is one-sided because, upon Maria Celeste's death, her collection of letters from her father was burned by the abbess of her convent. Maria Celeste's letters to her father, however, survived and paint a vivid portrait of life in a convent of that era.
posted by SPrintF at 8:59 AM on December 1, 2020 [1 favorite]

Back before email I used to send very elaborate, illustrated letters to a small group of friends. Several of them have told me that they still have all of them. I did not keep copies, and I have never heard of anyone doing this. (It would be a rare thing, because it would make writing more laborious and would involve a lot more time and expense.) In the unlikely event that I become famous and someone wants to collect my work in a museum, it would only be necessary to ask my friends for them.
It was not unusual when letters were written on paper and phone calls were unavailable or ran to several dollars a minute - and when I was a child the cost of a minute talking to a relative in England was what one would make in several hours at minimum wage - people usually kept them to read again, or just because they had an emotional connection to a friend and couldn't be thrown out.
posted by AugustusCrunch at 10:43 AM on December 1, 2020

lionindex, I remember seeing both what you describe and another thing that pressed a letter with writing to a blank sheet of paper.
posted by brujita at 11:15 AM on December 1, 2020

... Do you keep your own outgoing mail somehow?...

I've been handwriting and typewriting letters to friends, family and pen-pals regularly for the last seven years. I keep notebooks (I'm currently on my third ) in which I write summaries of my outgoing letters, not out of self-regard but as an aide-mémoire in the hope I might thereby repeat myself a little less often than I would otherwise.

*

In many cases people can't have done any such thing - in literary papers like the TLS, LRB, etc., one would sometimes see small ads placed by scholars and biographers with requests for correspondence from whomever they were studying, in an effort to reunite both halves of their correspondences.
posted by misteraitch at 6:09 AM on December 2, 2020