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The Post

What people put in letters: how they folded them, sealed them, drew in them, paid for them, and what they had to say.

A coloured eighteenth-century print of a Roman youth reading at a table while his mother clutches him and an older man points urgently at a smoking volcano across the bay

The Post · Misenum, Bay of Naples · 79

The Letter That Named a Kind of Volcano

A historian asked a seventeen-year-old's grown-up self how his uncle died. The answer, two letters about the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79, is the first eyewitness account of a volcanic eruption we have. And it might have the date wrong.

A folded paper letter from 1603, with a narrow paper strip threaded through slits to lock it shut

The Post · The Hague · 1697

Before Envelopes

The letter was its own envelope. People folded it into locks, sealed it with wax or with a dab of flour paste, crammed every inch with writing, and drew in the margins. And the person receiving it was the one who paid.