I miss mail. I get plenty of e-mail, voice-mail, and junk mail; but that doesn't seem to satisfy my desire for just plain old-fashioned, hand-written, white envelope with no see-through panel mail.

Nothing exciting happens in my mailbox anymore. I check it maybe once every two weeks, and usually I find nothing worth taking into the house. I pick up the stack, look through it for traces of something human, and when I find none it goes back in the box. I wish the mailman would just take it away, so it would never have to pass before my eyes again. Of course that never happens, and I'm left with this insatiable desire for REAL MAIL. Specifically illustrated letters.

So what's the point behind this rant? It's simple. I suspect that each one of you would also LOVE to get illustrated letters in the mail, and perhaps we could work out some sort of deal.

Send me an illustrated letter, and I will send you one back! Tell me about your hometown, or your dog, or a vacation you took, ANYTHING, as long as it's accompanied by some sort of illustration or design. It doesn't matter whether you think of yourself as an artist or not. Everything done by a human hand is infinitely more beautiful than 10 point times new roman accompanied with an oh so boring corporate logo and a jpeg of someone's handwritten name. Feel free to draw, paint, attach, collage, or whatever!

EVERYONE will receive an illustrated letter from me, and the person who sends me the coolest illustrated letter will also receive a book entitled "More than Words: Illustrated Letters from the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art". It's a pretty great book.

Just email me at cbuchholz@jplprod.com and I'll email you back with my mailing address. You guys could also use this blog as a way to set up letter swaps with other threadless users!

Finally, I want to thank Danny Gregory and Jim Mitchell for inspiring me to do this.

Here's some inspiration from the book:

In a letter to his daughter, painter and illustrator Allen Tupper True embellished his hotel stationery to express his awe of New York city's skyscrapers. He included himself as a speck on the street.


Visionary artist and Baptist preacher Reverend Howard Finster wrote to curator Barbara Shissler about a trip to Washington, D.C., for the opening of an exhibition Shissler had organized at what is now the Smtihsonian American Art Museum.


Paul Bransom portrayed himself fixated on a photograph of his sweetheart. A year later, Bransom married Grace and sold five covers to "The Saturday Evening Post," launching his career as a freelance illustrator.


This is one in a series of letters from painter and watercolorist Waldo Peirce to a Women's Auxiliary Army Corps captain stationed in Louisiana during World War II. Peirce, who married four times, divided his affections among three women, each shown happily eating a piece of his heart.


In this letter to his parents, painter William Cushing Loring describes his neighborhood in Paris and the 72-hour Bastille Day celebration that was taking place there in July 1901.


The spectacular view that unfolds is from Rutherford Boyd's New York studio on the top floor on East 23rd Street, an area populated with artists at the time. Exacting illustrations such as this earned Boyd a strong reputation.


Moses Soyer sent what he called a "puzzle picture" to his son, who was away at summer camp. In a watercolor vignette, he pictures the family dog and cat and baseball great Dizzy Dean. The baseball glove was shown flying from his home in New York to his son's bunk at Camp Quannacut.