Old-time Snail Mail

While on the subject of snail mail, let me throw out an "educational" post.

During one or other road-trip in Australia, we happened to pick up a radio interview with a stamp expert on how mail was sent a hundred or more years ago.

He mentioned that letters used to be pay-on-delivery, in other words you didn't pay to send them, but did pay to receive and open them. Of course, not everyone wanted to pay for an envelope - and pretty soon some ingenious ways were devised of communicating WITHOUT paying. If you wrote the address a certain way, it indicated all was well, something was wrong, there had been a death etc. That way the recipient could refuse to pay, and still get the message!

Later on stamps were introduced as a pre-pay method of sending communication. The first sheets weren't perforated, and had to be cut by hand with scissors. Many of those stamps ended up cut badly, some bits missing or torn or whatever. To find an undamaged stamp from that era is a big scoop for collectors! (I know of a guy in my dad's church that bought just such a stamp from a seller who didn't know it's value, for some small amount - and it was worth $20,000!). Of course, postmarks were also hand-stamped - who can forget the "traditional" image of some lady at the post office pounding piles of envelopes with an inked stamp?

Can you imagine sending mail in the old days? It travelled long distance by ship, shorter distances over land by horse and carriage. Any way you look at it, it took a long time to get anything to anyone - especially those adventurous types that were off exploring the African bush or something. By the time the letter reached them, the news would be outdated in a big way!

Now I know today's post-office sometimes leaves much to be desired. There are stories of letters sent decades ago that finally turn up - and even getting something from here to a few towns away may take 2 weeks (but perhaps that's just in South Africa). But it's still a far cry from how things worked in the past.

OK, perhaps mail wasn't stolen, and a sense of right still prevailed. One guy I read of used to just chuck his letters out his second-story window, even though there was a postbox right outside his door. He knew anyone who saw an unmailed envelope on the ground would pick it up and put it in the postbox - and they did! Nowadays it might lay there for a while, until it eventually disintegrated...

But sending snail-mail is certainly a lot easier and faster in this day and age. Which makes me wonder, yet again, why so few of us don't take advantage of it. Maybe we've all become lazy?