The early envelopes were often sealed with wax impressed by a signet ring to prevent the wrong people from reading them. As in, "Yes we'd love to have you visit, but we'll be out of town after the first of. No matter how carefully we cut open the flaps, we lose vital information. The trouble is, our friends keep having afterthoughts, and they write all over the margins. You write the letter, fold it, lick some gummed flaps, and suddenly your letter has turned itself into an envelope. We have some English friends who still insist on using those tissue paper aerograms dating from the 1930s. But by the 17th century separate envelopes appeared in Spain and France.Īnd what a relief that must have been. Because paper was so expensive, for many centuries letters were usually just folded, sealed and sent that way. The ancient Egyptians protected missives by rolling up the papyrus scrolls. the Chinese had developed a crude form of paper made from reeds and rice." Presumably they would protect the letter with a paper casing. "No one knows when envelopes came to China," Benjamin announced, "but we do know that by 1200 B.C. The only drawback with this ingenious plan is that the message had better not be terribly urgent. It seems to me that the envelope must have been invented by that mythic emperor who wrote a message on the shaved pate of a slave, let the hair regrow, and sent the man to his destination to be shaved anew and read. I'm going to have to slip off the track here, already. He lives in Alexandria, Virginia, and he happens to be the president of the Envelope Manufacturers Association.Īccording to Benjamin, it was the Babylonians who first thought of enclosing clay tablets in clay "envelopes" baked hard around their contents. The Postal Museum is one of my favorites, if only for the architecture-it's in the magnificent 1914 Washington City Post Office Building, right next to the equally grand 1908 Union Station.īenjamin is a stamp collector with a special interest in the Civil War, which is why he belongs to the Confederate Stamp Alliance. He has also written a book on the subject, and he signed copies after the lecture, held in conjunction with two Postal Museum shows, "Undercover: The Evolution of the American Envelope" and "The Graceful Envelope," featuring beautifully handcrafted works by designers and calligraphers from around the world. I see that one Maynard Benjamin gave a slide lecture on the history of envelopes at the National Postal Museum recently. In reading the various newsletters and calendars published by the Smithsonian, I have decided that the Institution is rather like Cairo: you can find just about anything here.
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