Letters of Note: Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience

Funny, tragic, brilliantly incisive, historic, lyrical, romantic and studiedly offensive, this stupendous compendium of letters ancient and modern is my book of the year. You will never tire of it - Stephen Fry In 2009, while researching a copywriting assignment for a stationery company, Shaun Usher noticed that the internet was full of facsimiles of letters. He started to collect the ones that appealed to him and the more he looked, the more interesting and memorable material he found. Soon, he was sitting on a rich trove of letters, telegrams, and memos that he felt were worth sharing. To do that he started a blog: www.lettersofnote.com, which quickly became the internet's most popular online museum of correspondence. Shaun's inspired selection and quirky juxtapositions turned the site into a virtual anthology, one that demanded a more permanent form. The result is Letters of Note, a collection of 150 of the best letters Shaun has found, each reproduced with a short introduction and transcript and bound into a book. Inside, the famous and infamous, the significant and the insignificant, the noble and the ignoble rub shoulders with one another. From the Queen's personal recipe for drop scones sent to President Eisenhower to the first recorded use of the expression OMG in a letter to Winston Churchill, from distraught fans of Elvis Presley begging the army not to cut his hair to a Kamikaze pilot writing to his two young children on the night before his mission, Letters of Note is a beautifully orchestrated sequence of fragments that captures the humour, seriousness, sadness and brilliance that make up our lives.