The Art of the Handwritten Letter

I’ve recently been trying a new app/service called Bond Gifts. Bond is essentially a gifting portal app with an assortment of curated gifts designed to live at the mid- to high-end. One of the novel gift options – one I haven’t seen elsewhere – is a handwritten letter. Essentially you type your message/letter in the app and then Bond turns your note into a handwritten note (see how it is done here). Their catch phrase is – “you type it, we write it.”

This past week I sent several people these “handwritten” notes. I loved the idea of the service. As I initially saw it, I could send a heartfelt letter from my iPhone. The easy of the iPhone with the care and touch of a handwritten note.

I am caught in a hybrid generation. One that began with the norm of written notes but one wherein the digital transition has now shifted written notes to the peripheral. Of course I never truly wrote letters like generations before me where travel and early communication technologies like interstate telephony were costly and/or not as heavily used.But I certainly lived a time when handwritten notes were all I knew. When I lived in Europe in the 1990s I hand wrote a letter to my parents each and every week. During that time I spoke with them only twice a year. Email was only then becoming common and it still required me to go to the local library where I had access to a computer and Internet access. As a result I didn’t send or receive many emails. I still have every handwritten letter I wrote and every letter I received from my parents during this period. I can still hear my dad’s voice in those letters. Despite their increasingly infrequent use, I still believe a handwritten note is appreciated. It is special. Obviously what Bond was trying to capture.

Bond attempts to upscale the handwritten notes by sealing the letter with a wax seal. As a return address they use my name with a mailing address in NYC. I sent a few “handwritten” notes to a few different people and the response was interesting. One recipient thought it was horrible. They knew my handwriting and thought it was someone attempting to make a bad joke – or worse – someone attempting blatant fraud. They didn’t believe the message was from me and the NYC address added doubt. The sincerity of my message was lost with the imperfect attention to details – details only I can personally get right. A second recipient asked if I “had my secretary in NYC write the letter.”

In all of this I realized the true art of the handwritten letter is not the “handwrittenness,” it is the time taken to write the note. I still like the idea of a handwritten note. A heartfelt note. I like the idea of taking the time to show appreciation. I decided to challenge myself to see if I could write just one handwritten note a day – 365 in the next year.

I plan to start tomorrow morning. And each morning after that for the next 364 days. Traveling might impede the perfect execution of this goal – I fly about 15 red-eyes a year – and have a pretty hectic schedule.  But I’ll try to make it the first thing I do at the start of each day.

I’ll report back in a year on how this experiment worked.