Growing up in the 90s “Collected Letters” books were still being published surrounding famous and notable figures, especially those in the literary world. I used to fantasize that one day my own letters would be collected… but I never really wrote any. When I first started emailing in high school, before Gmail existed, I used to save them all on hard drives and email servers that no longer exist. I really poured my soul out to them and connected on a personal level with people all over the world. I would even write authors and film directors and writers and far off university professors whose books I enjoyed and they wrote back to me, always impressed that a kid would reach out to them and correspond with them. I remember one of those foreign professors (who was also my cousin) marveling at my verbosity. The point isn’t to brag, but to ponder about this lost genre of literature. Sure, there are plenty of unpublished collection sitting around in archives that will one day see the light of day, but what was the last true collection of”Collected Letters” to actually be collected?
by RandomDigitalSponge