As an inhabitant of planet Earth since 1983, I am just old enough to remember the days when mail was, by definition, something tangible that was delivered to a free-standing box planted at the edge of the front yard — not something ephemeral that was received in an inbox or deposited in a spam folder.

Recommended Stories

• Twin studies: Review of ‘Parallel Lines’ by Edward St. Aubyn
• Bad books of summer
• Inside Scoop: Trump-Musk breakup, game of drones, artificial food dye fight

Even back then, though, I never seemed to have enough correspondents to suit my needs. My grandmother wrote me faithfully, and though I prized her missives, written in cursive that could only belong to someone born in 1908, I attempted to strike up written communications with many, many others: school friends who moved away, famous writers whom I admired, and even a pen pal from (I think) England. In the absence of regular replies, however, my missives became more akin to messages in a bottle. Chastened, my hope for the daily mail these days goes no further than the mortgage statement or the water bill. At last count, I send at least twice the number of Christmas cards, most including a letter or letter-like note, than I receive in reply.

Yet a new book by Rachel Syme gives me some hope that my youthful fondness for mail sent through the postal service is neither a private enthusiasm nor one hopelessly lost to the sands of time. Syme’s Letter Writer: A Guide to Modern Correspondence functions as both a paean to snail mail and a peppy guide to putting that lost art into practice once more. Perhaps Syme is quixotic, naïve, or impossibly twee to imagine that any significant number of people will ever untether themselves from their phones, learn proper penmanship or typing skills, and find at least one other human being willing to do the same. After all, the author is a staff writer at the New Yorker, arguably one of the more insular jobs on the planet.

Even so, Syme has put together a volume that would be at home on a set designed by Wes Anderson. The typefaces are lovely, eclectic, and ornate, the paper stock thick and substantial, the illustrations by Joana Avillez charming and imaginative, and the presentation positively nifty — up to and including the decision to place Syme’s introduction, such as it is, in the form of an actual letter that can be retrieved from an enclosed floral-printed envelope that reads “Open Me!” In fact, Syme’s ideal reader appears to be Margot Tenenbaum, the disillusioned playwright character played by Gwyneth Paltrow in Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums.

Upon being opened, Syme’s letter tells of her journey from being a keen letter-writer in her teens to an indifferent letter-writer in her young adulthood. “I was content, for a long time, to be an enthusiastic appreciator of other people’s correspondence,” writes Syme, who had something of an epiphany after picking up the published correspondence of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald from, inevitably, the Strand in New York. “I spent hours bathing myself in the language of their letters, which felt somewhat illicit,” she writes. “They were performing high-flying semantic acrobatics for one another in private, which to me felt about as erotic an activity as two people could perform.”

Fast forward to the pandemic, when Syme, looking to clarify her mind and to make use of her 1980s-era electric typewriter, began churning out correspondence “to old friends, to my parents, to anyone I knew who might want one.” “I remembered how much I had enjoyed the freedom and conspiratorial warmth of writing for just one other person,” writes Syme, who, looking to further her obsession, proceeded to start a pen pal exchange online.

Syme’s Letter Writer, which borrows its title and mandate from an 1867 how-to book titled Frost’s Original Letter-Writer, seems conceived with the goal of growing the ranks of pen pals through a plethora of practical advice. “I just want you to connect to someone else out there, late at night, scribbling away by candlelight,” she writes. “It’s not the worst thing you can do with an extra hour.”

Despairingly, some of Syme’s initial suggestions seem geared to text-messagers who struggle with the rudiments of sustained nonverbal communication. For example, an early chapter is titled “How to Write Your Very First Letter.” This is a heading one might normally expect in a book aimed at prekindergartners. “Accept the fact that your first letter is going to feel awkward and stilted and not like your best work,” Syme counsels, bleakly. “But also know that your letter, no matter its legibility or coherence, will be met with absolute excitement.” Happily, the book becomes less self-helpish and more productively useful for readers already familiar with written English but unacquainted with the practice of keeping up long-form correspondence.

Syme proceeds to proffer guidance on writing letters to specific demographics, including celebrities (she suggests aiming low, being brief, and not expecting an answer), mothers (“a letter is a vessel that can gently cradle family drama that would otherwise explode at Thanksgiving”), and to those whom the sender owes an apology (“the key to the apology letter is to see it as its own end, and never to expect an easy or clear result”). Love letters are given their own section — “make them full of sweeping declarations and lists of memories” — while the sharing of secrets by post, rather than electronic means, is commended. “There is an unspoken rule that anything that comes in an envelope demands much more care than what you might toss around at a party after a few Manhattans or even over email or text,” she writes. The “even” part is a bit dispiriting, but her basic point is right.

Syme is at her best in addressing specific content to incorporate in possible epistles. For example, a vocabulary is included for those inclined to write about the weather: the words “russet,” “bracing,” and “tawny” might be appropriate for autumn, while “nippy,” “glacial,” and the always-amusing “Siberian” could be worked into a letter penned during the winter. Assorted categories of correspondence are considered, including airmail, postcards, and hotel stationery, though Syme sadly concedes that there will be an element of affectation involved in trying to revive some of these modes. Airmail, she notes, has ceased to be a meaningful category because all mail sent across oceans now travels by air, but she still encourages the use of “the blue-and-red striped envelopes” and “retro stickers” on aesthetic grounds. By the same token, she proposes amassing old hotel stationery from eBay or online flea markets to compensate for the simple truth that many hotels no longer offer their own logo-emblazoned notepads. (Does this mean my stationery from the Windsor Court in New Orleans is a collector’s item?)

The book offers a digression on the merits of onion skin paper, a “taxonomy” of envelopes, an assessment of vintage versus new fountain pens, and a discussion of how to use vintage stamps without the mail being returned: “As long as it has never been mailed before, any old stamp is still perfectly viable” — though (duh) it must be figured to the postal rate. Like a long-winded correspondent, Syme tends to exhaust the reader in her thoroughness and zeal, but her instruction is generally well-informed.

PUBLIC BROADCASTING, A PUBLIC MENACE?

Notwithstanding the seemingly universal nature of her guidance, Syme seems distressingly in tune with the likely audience of this book, the aforementioned Margot Tenenbaum and her real-life imitators. It isn’t just the book’s flounced and frilled design but its references to Simone de Beauvoir, Sylvia Plath, and Diana Vreeland, its extended discourse on writing about fashion, its suggestion of “spritzing” outgoing mail, and a chapter titled “How to Write a Letter About Interesting Times,” the last of which is defined by Syme as consisting, essentially, of our present era and what she considers its manifold sins: “The economy is slowing to a halt, social media is full of trolls and misinformation, reproductive rights are under attack, trains full of toxic waste are derailing in the suburbs, the news is full of police brutality and gun violence and a swelling and nauseating intolerance.” Well, then. May I remind Syme that would-be correspondents also count among their ranks men, conservatives, and those for whom Didion is not god. Moreover, at the risk of taking a bit of hyperbole literally, those who know that the U.S. economy is 2.7 times the size it was in 2000, according to the World Bank.

All the same, this book is full of tidbits and exhortations relevant to readers of either gender and all political stripes, although something ineffably sad looms over this whole enterprise. Letter-writing may be superior to texting, but taken to the obsessive extremes endorsed here, when does it become a substitute for living? I would love to have a correspondent or two, but to get utterly lost in letters may, in the long run, be as misguided as being permanently buried in a smartphone.

Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.