Letters Of Note – Dogs

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104 – May, 2026

By Sarah Montague

Shaun Usher’s website: https://shaunusher.com/, describes him as “Professional Letter Nerd.” He has earned that title honorably. In 2009, he established a “Letters of Note” website to explore and share his fascination with other people’s letters which, he explained, consisted of “correspondence deserving of a wider audience.” And he gave them one—the site has been visited over 100 million times. This was a period in which much of life was still material, not digital, and Usher obtained letters from families, archives, books, museums, and other collections. Then he lovingly posted facsimiles to his site.

In a talk given at Google in 2015 Usher shared that he and his wife had courted by letter: “when you sit down to write a letter…you’re far more willing to be honest and open. You say things that you wouldn’t say in any other setting…And I knew that I was going to look into letter writing as an art form at some point.”

This mission shaped the character of the website, so that its followers could share in not only the contents and the context of a letter (for example, Leonardo da Vinci’s letter to a potential patron, in which he mentions in the last lines that he paints a little) but its physical life. Usher’s selections ranged across centuries and continents, and reflected the lives of ordinary people, celebrities, and even Queen Elizabeth II, who shared a recipe for scones with then-US President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

In 2014, the original Letters of Note book was published. It was an impressive coffee table book with beautiful reproductions of many of the letters, and became an international bestseller.

Click here to read the complete article
104 – May, 2026

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Posted by AnthonyA on May 10 2026. Filed under Current Articles, Featured. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.