What to Read: Shaun Usher is curating history's most memorable mail

This week, we interviewed Shaun Usher, who writes Letters of Note, a publication that explores thought-provoking, funny, and notable letters sent throughout history.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Shaun Usher

What’s your publication about in one sentence?

Letters of Note is a journey through the letters of the famous, the infamous, and the not-so-famous that will grip and fling you from one emotion to the next and occasionally educate even the most informed of minds.

You’ve been obsessed with letters since you and your now-wife began writing to each other 20 years ago. Why did you start an epistolary relationship, and how did that format differ from traditional dating?

Soon after we started dating, my now-wife moved to Spain for the best part of a year to study, and we thought it would be a novel idea to write old-fashioned letters to each other—on paper! With ink!—during that period. And we were right. It was really enjoyable and a very welcome change of pace—but more importantly, for our relationship at least, we opened up to each other, through letters, in a way I’m not sure we would have done had we kept in touch by, e.g., text message.

What’s your process for finding and curating letters? How do you know something is worth sharing?

I spend most of my days looking through old books, contacting archivists, browsing online repositories, and sifting through suggestions from readers, all in search of the gems. If a letter raises the hairs on the back of my neck, moistens even one of my eyes, or shines a light on a person or moment in history of which I was previously unaware, I’ll add it to the pile of letters to be shared.

Is letter writing a lost art? Is there an analog in today’s society?

Letter writing has been on the wane for decades, and each generation seems to panic about its demise as a new technology rears its head. The telephone, the telegram, the email … all have loomed over the trusty letter, seemingly poised to strike the fatal blow, but as of yet, none have succeeded. Letters—the ones you place in envelopes and send through the mail, the ones that land on the doormat with a satisfying thud—will always feel special to their recipient, and will provoke a reaction unavailable to any of the alternatives.

And that’s not to say emails or texts have no value. They really do! But letters offer something else, a deeper flavor, and we should keep them in our back pocket for those moments when a pixelated message just won’t do.

Is there a particular letter you return to the most?

E.B. White once declined an invitation with a line I’ve used quite a few times, to great effect. It was 1956, and he wrote:

Thanks for your letter inviting me to join the committee of the Arts and Sciences for Eisenhower.

I must decline, for secret reasons.

Those final six words hold immense power.

Valentine’s Day is around the corner. What are some of your favorite love letters, and why?

It’s like choosing a favorite child. Vita Sackville-West once wrote a letter to Virginia Woolf, from whom she had been parted for some time. She wrote, in part:

I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way.

I adore the fact that she was so consumed by longing that to write at any great length was an impossibility. Love can be paralyzing. And whilst it’s not a love letter per se, in 1958 John Steinbeck wrote to his lovesick son and described the different kinds of love that can cripple a person, and it’s a piece of writing that I think should be handed to every teenager on earth. Near the end he writes, “Nothing good gets away,” which I think is a lovely thing to say. 

(Also, and please forgive the plug, most of my favorites appear in my book Letters of Note: Love, which contains letters by people such as Simone de Beauvoir, Frida Kahlo, Georgia O’Keeffe, Zora Neale Hurston, and Evelyn Waugh. It’s essentially a love letter to the love letter.)

“If a letter raises the hairs on the back of my neck, moistens even one of my eyes, or shines a light on a person or moment in history of which I was previously unaware, I’ll add it to the pile of letters to be shared.”

Who’s another Substack writer you’d recommend?

Austin Kleon. He’s an artist whose work I’ve followed for years, and his Substack never fails to kick me into action. He has a zest for creativity that I find hugely inspiring. 

Subscribe to Shaun’s publication, Letters of Note, and find him on Twitter and Instagram.