Back in the eighties, when it seems like everything was easier and less regulated, we used to have fun sending letters in which as much was written on the outside as the inside. Sometimes the address was nearly impossible to find, but they all somehow got delivered. Now, of course, we have regulations on how the outside of an envelope must be formatting and I have had mailings returned for very simple infractions. Most of our 80s posts would probably have been returned to us right when we handed them to the postman.

I was telling Mai about these envelopes just yesterday (this memory was inspired by us looking at PostSecret in which someone had mailed a (properly formatted and addressed) banana. I wished that I had one of those envelopes to post on this site. Today, the very next day, an email arrives from Carol Huff, containing an extremely high quality scan of the front and back of one of these. While this one is not a good example of what I wanted to show, because it was never addressed or mailed (I must have still had it when I ended up visiting or it was thrown inside a larger mailed package - I don't remember) and the text is not as densely packed as some of the ones I remember. It is however one of the ones I actually remember writing some of (the tomato sandwich being a line that comes to me from time to time.)

Anyway with that much synchronicity behind it I just had to work on posting it right away. While I have reduced the size of the images considerably they still needed to remain rather large to allow actual viewing, so it might take some time to load on slower Internet connections.