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Syme's Letter Writer: A Guide to Modern Correspondence About (Almost) Every Imaginable Subject of Daily Life, with Odes to Desktop Ephemera and Selected Letters of Famous Writers - Hardcover

Syme, Rachel

 
9780593235102: Syme's Letter Writer: A Guide to Modern Correspondence About (Almost) Every Imaginable Subject of Daily Life, with Odes to Desktop Ephemera and Selected Letters of Famous Writers
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 059323510X ISBN 13: 9780593235102
Verlag: Clarkson Potter, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

A literary jaunt in praise of the lost art of letter writing that explores a cultural history and the undeniable thrill of old-school correspondence—from New Yorker culture writer Rachel Syme.

Inspired by a bestselling turn-of-the-century correspondence handbook penned by a snooty Victorian who had strong opinions on how to lick a stamp, Rachel Syme has rewritten the staid rules of yore for today’s letter writers. Syme insists you must stuff your envelopes with flat frivolities (tip: never glitter!), ask before you perfume a parcel, and cultivate your own ritual around keeping up with your correspondence.

Immerse yourself in this epistolary bric-a-brac celebrating the intimate (whimsical! expressive!) art of written correspondence, covering every part of the process from courting and keeping a pen pal down to buying the best nibs for your refurbished vintage fountain pen. As you read fragments of letters from some of contemporary history’s most iconic figures—Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Audre Lorde and Pat Parker, Virginia Woolf, MFK Fisher, Diana Vreeland, Octavia Butler—take note of how to write about the weather without being a total snooze, how to write a letter like a poet, and how to infuse your writing with a glamorous mystique. Learn about Julia Child’s lifelong pen pal, Maya Angelou’s penchant for hotel stationery, and the importance of choosing a signature paper that captures your essence.

After all, the words you write on paper, no matter how limited the audience, can offer comfort, shared sorrow, cathartic rage, hard-earned insight, refreshing strangeness, absurd silliness, understanding, peace, beauty—and often all of those things all mixed up at the same time.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Rachel Syme is a New York-based writer, reporter, and cultural critic. As a New Yorker staff writer, she has written about subjects ranging from "bathfluencers," landlines, and the art of the Hollywood memoir to conversations with Jamie Lee Curtis, Rick Steves, Patti Lupone, Mandy Patinkin, and Barbra Streisand. Her work can also be seen in the New York Times Magazine, Elle, GQ, Grantland, New York, Vogue, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, and The New Republic, among other publications.

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Dear Reader

(OR HOW TO USE THIS BOOK)

In 1867, the natty New York–based publisher Dick & Fitzgerald put out a chunky little book called Frost’s Original Letter-Writer by an author who went by the mysterious pen name S. A. Frost. The actual author of the book, an exhaustive, punctilious guide to all things written correspondence, was an enterprising woman named Sarah Annie Frost (and who later went by Mrs. Sarah Annie Frost-Shields). Little is known about Frost’s personal life, save for the fact that she had an innate entrepreneurial streak—a rare trait for a Victorian housewife—and built herself a lucrative little publishing empire by pumping out several volumes of persnickety lifestyle manuals. In 1869, three years before Emily Post was even born, Frost wrote Frost’s Laws and by-Laws of American Society, in which she laid out concise, confident, and often fully nutball etiquette tips for every situation from baptisms to bruncheons to bath time. (My favorite of her absurdist bathing rules: “Cold water refreshes and invigorates but does not cleanse; those persons, therefore, who daily use a cold bath in the morning should frequently use a warm one at night.”) The Victorians were big on protocol; they never met a draconian dictum that didn’t excite them a bit in the bloomers. Tell a Victorian that they have to learn six new ways to hold a teacup by sundown and they’ll say, “Don’t threaten me with a good time.” Sarah Annie Frost was more than happy to serve as a kind of marmish domme of the domestic sphere, rapping the collective knuckles of those who had not yet learned that the best way to wash the hair is with a slurry of raw egg yolk and lime juice.

I came across a copy of Frost’s Original Letter-Writer online in the summer of 2020, when I had just started to write a lot of letters to strangers on my hideous, beige beater of an electric typewriter from the 1980s (she is a Nakajima AE-710 and I love her very much, and you will learn more about why in the Typewriters section later in this book; see page 162). I was on the hunt for the history of letter-writing, and my explorations led me down a rabbit hole that ended in Frost’s guide, one of the first books to formally lay out tips and tricks of the mail-sending trade.

Frost’s suggestions are hilariously outdated (I don’t imagine many people today using her form letter for “answering an advertisement for a chambermaid”), but some of her wisdom holds up, such as her advice that using quotations or song lyrics in a letter feels twee and cheap (“Quotations should be used as a very rare luxury, as they are apt to give an appearance of pedantry and studied effect”) or her choice of writing instruments: “Never write in pencil. It is always careless, often rude.” Also, if you want to know how to send a truly creepy request to your fiancée asking for a lock of her hair while calling her a “stingy little pet,” well, Frost has that covered too.

I share with you the story of S. A. Frost (and my favorite excerpt is on the next page—a truly deranged and bitchy form letter in which a man advises a younger acquaintance to ditch a friend) to say that, for as long as people have been flinging paper back and forth through the postal service, they have been wondering if they are doing it right.

Cottage industries have sprung up like barnacles in Frost's wake, offering suggestions for how best to open a letter (Is it Dear? Do people even say dear anymore?) and how to close one (Is XOXO too Gossip Girl? Does Warmly seem too tryhard or just tryhard enough? Would writing “All best” mark me as a sociopath?). Letters are such an intimate medium; they are meant for an audience of one. But, also, that one person will be spending a lot of time with whatever you send, poring over it with a hot beverage (or a cold cocktail) in hand. It makes sense that there is such public handwringing about such a private form. You want your letter to arrive at its destination, sure, but you also want it to really arrive. You want it to land. So people like Sarah Frost rush in to fill the void and to comfort the shaking hand over the blank page, ensuring nervous nellies that even a lackluster letter in the post is better than no letter at all.

I am, I admit, no Sarah Annie Frost-Shields. I have no hard-and-fast correspondence rules for you. I barely have any rules at all, except that you should apply the proper postage to your letters and learn how and when to use non-machinable stamps (and you will! See On Stamps on page 182). But this book is intended to be a nouveau Frost’s Original Letter-Writer of sorts, one that takes Frost’s boundless energy for telling confused people what to do and updates it for the modern—and decidedly not letter-centric—era. If Frost were alive today, she’d probably have a very popular TikTok account or a correspondence-themed Substack (her book The Art of Dressing Well does seem #cottagecore adjacent). But I have the pages of this book to work with, and I hope to provide a bit of structure around what I’ve learned when it comes to writing letters from the time I’ve spent on the PenPalooza project—a letter-exchange I launched on a whim during the early days of the pandemic that swelled to more than fifteen thousand members—and also from reading the correspondence of writers of the past. Like any good nineteenth-century prig, Sarah Frost did not trust anyone’s opinion but her own. I don’t possess so staunch an attitude. I have looked to other authors and poets and cooks and explorers and wanderers and the letters they have sent to inform my own how-tos—this is more of a group hymnal than a solo expedition.

The how-tos sprinkled throughout this book—How to Write a Postcard, How to Develop a Style in Your Correspondence, How to Write a Letter about Your Dreams, etc.—are meant as cheeky riffs on Frost’s formatting, but are far less rigid (you won’t find how to write a “Note Accompanying a Bouquet of Flowers to a Lady” here, or guidelines for a “Letter Recommending a Man Servant.”). Instead, they are merely intended to get you writing and to make you excited to sit down and compose a letter. We’ll explore how to write about a sumptuous meal, how to write a bitchy dispatch full of gossip and intrigue, and how to write about a beautiful spring day in a way that doesn’t just feel like snoozy small talk. Along the way, there will be writing prompts, excerpts from letters past, lists of truly good, not overly pretentious $10 words to drop into your prose, care package suggestions, and tips on how to properly scent a perfumed letter. You will also find my version of a field guide to all the tangible, physical, touchable, collectible, snacky things you can use to liven up a letter. Fountain pens! Stamps! Embossing guns! Types of envelopes (yes, it gets wild . . . )!

In the bygone days when letters were the only way to communicate from afar, writing out a long, meandering note and tucking it into a plain envelope was more than enough to deliver a thrill. Everyone was so bored! Offering someone ten pages of scratchy handwriting that took the entire afternoon to read and broke up the monotony of the day? A gift. When you see people squeal and rush to the door in period films when the Pony Express arrives, they are not necessarily overacting; receiving a piece of mail was perhaps the most exciting and exotic thing to happen to a person all week, maybe all month. Now, letters can barely compete with every other bit of stimulation flying at our faces, not because they...

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Verlag
Clarkson Potter
Erscheinungsdatum
2024
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
059323510X
ISBN 13 
9780593235102
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
224
Kontakt zum Hersteller
preigu GmbH & Co. KG
mail@preigu.de

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