Charles Schulz not only conducted a secret affair with a fan, but the passion he expressed in his letters to her (and kept from his wife) were often mirrored in his Peanuts strip.Otherwise, you are pretty certain to find it lying about, after the Post has gone.’ (see the extract on this website for more). And some of his advice reflected personal experience: If you write that you’re enclosing a cheque or someone else’s letter ‘leave off writing for a moment – go and get the document referred to – and put it into the envelope. Some of it was rather obvious: write legibly, and before replying to someone’s letter, make sure to read it through carefully first and send it to the correct address. As well as designing a special wallet to store stamps, Lewis Carroll also wrote a letter-writing guide.It was the earliest, rather more modest version of SWALK. Rather than write, ‘If you’re well, that’s good – all’s well with me’, correspondents wrote SVBEEQV ( si vales bene est, ego quidem valeo). The abbreviation used by letter writers in Ancient Rome to enquire about a person’s health and say that they were fine.‘I do not want you to see in the paper or hear possibly on the wireless the terrible thing that has happened…She has been through hell these last days…Now we can only wait till the first horrors are over which somehow make it almost impossible to feel much. The sequence of eight letters Leonard Woolf and Vanessa Bell wrote to Vita Sackville-West in the days after Virginia Woolf drowned herself in 1941.A story, perhaps apocryphal, of Oscar Wilde being so trusting of human nature that he would throw out stamped letters onto the street from his rooms in Chelsea, confident that a passer-by would post them in the nearest box.Here, in random order, are some of my favourite passages to (hopefully) whet your appetite. But it also asks some proper questions, not least, ‘How will we be able to tell our history without letters?’ I make it clear in the book that I don’t think the answer lies with emails. To The Letter is both a celebration and a lament, and hopefully an inspiration. A world without letters would surely be a world without oxygen. It must have seemed impossible that their worth would ever be taken for granted or swept aside. The world once used to run upon their transmission – the lubricant of human interaction and the freefall of ideas, the silent conduit of the worthy and the incidental, the time we were coming for dinner, the account of our marvellous day, the weightiest joys and sorrows of love. They change lives, and they rewire history.

They reveal motivation and deepen understanding. Letters have the power to grant us a larger life.

To the letter by simon garfield