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Are letter boxes, postage stamps, Christmas and birthday cards, love etters, thank you notes, pen pals, and postcards all destined to become archaic curiosities, like telephone kiosks? Denmark’s national postal service, PostNord, ended traditional letter delivery on 31 December 2025, becoming the first country to do so, following a 90% decline in letter volume, with letter boxes now being removed from the streets and sold.
In the UK, the most recent Ofcom postal service monitoring report said that 7.3 billion letters were sent in the UK in the 2022-2023 financial year, down from a peak of 20 billion in 2003. Of these, only 2.2 billion items were letters or greetings cards, the remainder being ‘bulk mail’ – the polite term for unsolicited junk.
Reacting to this trend, The Handwritten Letter Appreciation Society was founded by Dinah Johnson in 2017 with the aim of preventing letter writing from becoming a lost art form. The Society now has more than 2,000 members, and has received numerous celebrity endorsements: King Charles III (an inveterate letter-writer himself, as was his mother) has described the society as ‘inspirational’.
What makes letter-writing different from an email, text, or social media post is its intimacy. ‘Social media turns your friends into an audience’, says Dinah, ‘and one of the joys of letter-writing is that you can express yourself freely to another person without worrying what other people will think – a rare experience these days.’
Indeed, one wonders what the future holds for that long-standing literary tradition, which involves publishing the edited correspondence of notable figures in history and art, revealing their personal struggles, creative processes, and relationships (recently, for example, we have seen the publication of the tenth volume of letters from T S Eliot, and a 700-page volume of the letters of John le Carré).
The Society’s website has tips on getting started, if you haven’t written a letter in a while (‘imagine you are having a conversation with the recipient, write as you would talk to them, and don’t worry about mistakes’). It also has details of the mass letter-writing events that the Society organises, such as Penny Black Day, marking the anniversary on 6 May every year of the world’s first prepaid postage stamp.
Further information: http://www.thehandwrittenletterappreciationsociety.org
Is there a society that you would like to see profiled? Write to theeditor@archaeology.co.uk
Images: The Handwritten Letter Appreciation Society; The Postal Museum
