Tuesday, July 2, 2013

Crossed letters

As long as I've been writing letters, the concept of "crossed letters" would have meant that two letters "crossed in the mail." For example, if I mail a letter to a friend who mails a letter to me on the same day, our letters figuratively or maybe literally cross paths on their journeys to our homes.

But, in the more distant past, a "crossed letter" was a completely different concept. A crossed letter was also called "cross-hatched" and was a paper-saving method. Letter writers wrote twice on each side of each sheet of paper, filling up the page once and then turning the page a quarter of a turn and writing over those words at a right-angle. It's a little confusing. Marie Tschopp writes more about the concept on her blog "All Things Laura Ingalls Wilder."

Here's a picture of a crossed letter, courtesy of the Boston Public Library's flickr page. It's quite interesting.


1 comment:

wendy said...

I don't know if I'd be able to read one or not but might be something fun to try with my letter writing group! So interesting.

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