First, I suppose, come letters; then adventure.
— Robert Louis Stevenson
| Writing Contest | |
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Know a young person who might be interested in the Universal Postal Union's letter-writing competition (page 7)? Check out the web site for the 2012 contest, including rules and entry form. You can also see the results of past competitions dating to 1972. Not all countries that belong to the UPU sponsor national letter-writing contests, which is a requirement for eligibility in the global contest (only the country's contest organizers, not individuals or schools, can submit entries), so check your local situation before getting your children too excited about the contest. It's okay to get them excited about letter writing in general, though! |
| Writing between the Lines | |
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Wondering about the more than 200 books Lexer Tami Orr (Writing between the Lines, page 8) has written? (And she still finds time for letters!) Here's a link to many of them. You can also read an interview with Tami at Home Education Magazine, and if you don't want to wait until the next issue of Lex to see what she's writing about, check out the magazine itself. |
| Preserving the Past with Paper | |
| As Bob Martin points out (page 10), it's both family and cultural history that's been enriched by letters and their preservation. One person has a rather unique idea on how to preserve e-mails: print and bind them into a book. That might not leave a representative sample of the immense universe of e-mails, but if the technology keeps changing and in 2111 it's not easy to access the electronic archives of a century before, historians could find printed versions invaluable. | |
| The World of Letters | |
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For several centuries people have exclaimed about the letters of Madame de Sévigné (The World of Letters, page 22). To read more, check out the selection at Powell's Books or at archive.org. Horace Walpole praises the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu by saying "the wit and style are superior to any letters I ever read but Madame Sévigné's;" in this century, Virginia Woolf wrote an essay about her letters. The hotel where she lived for the last twenty years of her life is now a museum; so is the mansion ("The Rocks") in Brittany where she wrote most of her letters, including the one reprinted in Issue 26. |
| Clicking on the books on this page will take you to Powell's, the world's largest independent bookstore. You can also use the search engine to the left. Any purchase you make by following one of these links will help support LEX – not just these items but any book or DVD in their inventory. | |
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Copyright 2011