How the A-List fell in love with snail mail – and you can too

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f you are one of the 120,000 audience members who’ve attended a Letters Live show, you have Shaun Blanco-Usher’s awkwardly timed budding relationship with the woman who is now his wife to thank.

“After we met in 2002 she moved away to Spain for a year as part of a university course. And we decided to stay in touch by letter — this was before we started using emails and before Facebook and all that. So we wrote to each other, handwritten letters. We fell in love by letter, and I also fell in love with letter writing.”

Years later, stuck in a job he “hated”, he started a website. Letters of Note was where Blanco-Usher published what he called “correspondence deserving of a wider audience”, written by figures as diverse as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Iggy Pop. The site gained a cult social following, which in turn spawned a book. For its 2013 launch, the publishing house Canongate’s chief executive, Jamie Byng, gathered some of London’s cultural lights — Benedict Cumberbatch and Gillian Anderson among them — to read from the book. It was a hit.

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