What with all of the emails and text messages all around us these days, it may seem that the art of writing letters and cards is slowly fading into oblivion. After all, who wants to wait days if not weeks to get some hard-to-read words scribbled down on a piece of paper when it would be so much easier to just read an email?
But sending and receiving letters is about so much more than that. It’s about someone taking the extra time and effort to actually write words down and then making that despised trip to the post office to wait in a long line to finally send it off. It’s about someone deciding to go into all that effort and spend a few cents on postage just to make their message personal.
And that’s what World Stationery Day is about: preserving the art of writing letters and cards, as opposed to just sending those we care about pictures of letters that cannot truly be touched on a screen. If that’s not an honorable cause, what is?
History of World Stationery Day
Humans have been writing for thousands of years, since prehistory. The Dispillo tablet is thought to be the oldest written record on Earth, dating back to the 6th millennium BC. After that, writing seemed to spring up in different places, being especially prominent in the Near East.
At the time, the main reason for writing becoming a necessity was that information needed to be transmitted as a political expansion to be able to take place. Soon, financial transactions and historical events were being documented using writing as well. The Mesopotamian writing system is thought to be the oldest writing system. Dating back to 3600 BC, it was based on the simple concept of pressing a triangular-shaped stylus into soft clay.
As everything does, writing slowly evolved from these triangles into what it is today. World Stationery Day was created in 2012 to help make sure the art of writing would not go extinct, as some feared it would because of all of the technological advancements of our times making actually writing much less practical than other methods of communication.
