The love letter is dying.

Okay, okay, I’ll back off and try not to be such an alarmist.

The love letter as we once knew it is dying.

Once upon a time — so the conventional wisdom goes — love letters were penned by heartsick, ink-stained wretches who would enclose their deepest thoughts on parchment paper inside bottles or wax-sealed envelopes, leaving the fate of the letters themselves up to the whims of waves or over-burdened letter carriers. Romances were stoked carefully from a distance, heated by imagination, absence, and longing.

All too often these days, the florid language of courtship gets condensed to 160 characters so it can fit into a text message. The written proof of love and desire gets digitized and deleted. There may always be room under your bed for your shoebox of high-school love letters, but your hard drive only has so much space.

So, how nice it is to see a book that celebrates the love letter as the wholly imperfect and idiosyncratic art form that it is.

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