A Short History of Mail Clubs
The mail club is a new name for a very old habit: waiting for something good to land in your mailbox, and paying a little to keep it coming.
Mail has always been a club
People were running mail clubs before anyone called them that. Round-robin letters circled families, each person adding a page and sending it on. Magazines came by subscription, anticipated and dog-eared. Victorian readers followed novels one installment at a time, waiting weeks for the next chapter. The format is old. The name is what’s new.
The pen pal era
Then came the pen pal boom. From the 1930s on, organizations set out to match strangers across towns and oceans: the Student Letter Exchange began pairing schoolchildren in 1936, and International Pen Friends followed in the 1960s. A generation grew up with a friend they knew only by handwriting. Membership peaked in the late 1990s. The joy was the exchange, your life for theirs, in envelopes that took weeks to cross the world.
The subscription boom
The internet was supposed to end all this, and for a while it nearly did. Email was instant and free, so why would anyone wait? But instant turned out to be easy to forget. In 2010, Birchbox launched the modern subscription box, and within a few years it had more than a million subscribers. It reminded people how good it feels to get something in the mail again, even when a company sent it.
The snail-mail revival
Then it swung back to the handmade. Tired of the feed, people started wanting the real thing: a letter, a print, a piece made by a person. The pandemic poured fuel on it. Rachel Syme’s Penpalooza exchange drew more than 15,000 people in 2020, and Postcrossing has now carried more than 85 million postcards between strangers. The current wave is young and very online, the people who live on their phones, choosing paper anyway.
Where mail clubs are now
Today there are more, and more kinds, than ever: reflective clubs, art clubs, story clubs, seasonal clubs, history clubs, mail art clubs. Each one is one person making one real thing and sending it out on a schedule. A directory like this one exists because there are finally enough of them to need a map.
The through-line
The tools keep changing. The round-robin, the pen pal club, the subscription box, the mail club: different machinery, one impulse underneath. Make something. Send it to someone. Say, without quite saying it, I was thinking of you.