Sue Bleiweiss

Letters from Grace...

There were a couple of challenges I had to deal with to work with these letters.  First off was the fact that they were written  by a 7 year old so it was important to me to create a book that reflected that.  I didn't want anything too sophisticated looking so I decided to use cork paper and chalkboard cloth for this project.  The second challenge was that there were no envelopes for these letters.  It appears that they were all opened and stored flat because there are no real creases set in any of the papers.  So I wanted to bind them into the book without folding them.  This meant that the book had to be a little bit bigger than the ones I've done in the past which I think actually helped to add to the overall cohesiveness of the project. 

This book measures 11" X 8"x 1" closed.  Upon opening the book you'll find a note from me:

That says:

Grace harding wrote these letters to her mother and daddy over the period of 1927 to 1929 while she lived at Mrs. M. Lewtas Burt's School for Tiny Tots in Peekskill NY. 

Grace was an average student who got along well with her class mates and seem to enjoy her time at school.  She writes of sleigh rides, birthday and Halloween parties and her part in the school play. She was a thoughtful and caring little girl and in her letter to santa after asking for a sled, a book, a game and some dishes she hopes that she has not asked for too much.

Grace fell sick several times over the school year with whooping cough, the measles and other general childhood maladies but through all of them she continued to write to Mother and Daddy asking them to come see her during the upcoming weekend. 

Grace was 7 years old in 1927 and these are her letters...

There are 38 letters and two of her report cards in this book. 

On another note:  I want to thank all of you who wrote to me about the death of my dog Robin last weekend.  Your notes and emails meant a lot to me and I appreciated every one of them.

Letters to Nancy

I've been working on this book for the last few weeks:

Inside this book are 24 letters written over a period from September 1881 to December 1883 to a Miss Nancy A Austin in Yorkville from a gentleman named W M Moody.    In these letters W writes of his love for Nancy and of how he wishes he could see her more often.  In one letter he writes "Let my pleasures be great or few but the happiest hours I ever spent I spent them along with you."  and in another "I think of you when you are far away oh that I could see you I could tell you more in one hour than I could write in a day and it would be pleasing to my very heart."  He obviously loved her very much but I got the impression from the letters that they weren't allowed to see each other very often because he was away for some reason but the reason is never mentioned. 

It was a bit of a challenge to come up with a way to display these letters because I was working with paper that was over 100 years old.  The envelopes were crumbling and many of them were missing the backs or had torn loose from them.  I really wanted to use them though because they had so much character and charm.

So I created a pocket on each page in the book that I attached the outside of the envelope to and then tucked the letter inside of that.  The pages themselves are a nice 100% cotton Stonehenge paper that I "aged" with walnut ink.  All the pages were torn to size by hand.

I wanted the reader of the book to be able to experience what was written in the letters without having to actually handle the letters so I went through and transcribed all of them and then printed excerpts from each of them.  The letters are not in too bad a shape considering how old they are but they do need to be handled with great care.   You can read all the excerpts that I printed in the book here if you like. 

In his last letter to her in December of 1883 he writes "I am going to send you one of my cards and I hope you will appreciate it and remember it as the poetry ascends from ones heart. "

I happened to have acquired a stack of old cabinet cards from the 1800's so I went through and picked one and tucked it into the last pocket along with the letter.  In this last letter to her he is telling her goodbye and wishes her well.  He writes "May the rose head of your happy life ever bloom with true happiness is the wish of your true friend".  I decided to include a complete transcription of the letter as the last one in the book since it's the last one in the series.  Again you can read all of the excerpts from the book here.

Letters to Mary...

I have become quite fond of working with vintage documents, letters and photos lately. Recently I had purchased a set of 13 old letters written to a young girl named Mary Helen Epler over the period of 1940 to 1946 and I decided to bind them into a book:

"Letters to Mary"
Hand made hard cover book with a paper bag surface, 7 1/2" x 5" x 1", leather strap close.

They are all in their original envelopes and looking through them is an interesting way to get a glimpse of what was going on in the world at that time. As I read through them I learned that Mary's birthday was July 14th and that she corresponded regularly with her grandpa who suffered a heart attack in 1942 and died shortly after. There's a letter to her written just a couple of weeks before he died (in the photo below) in which he tells her that the Dr's told him that spending three more weeks in bed would make him a new man. He was looking forward to listening to the Cardinals and Cubs game later that day and hoped that the Cardinals would win. Just a couple of weeks later she received a condolence letter about his death.

At the time it cost only 3 cents to mail a letter and the postmarks encourage buying war bonds. In a letter to Mary from her Aunt Elizabeth in July of 43 she asks Helen if she and her mother are doing any war work and talks about a gas shortage. There is no mention of Mary's father in any of the letters.

I thought about these letters as I created the book that I bound them in and I couldn't help wondering what became of Mary. Assuming that she was a teenager in 46 she could be in her 80's now. I wonder where she is and what she's doing and how her letters ended up in the hands of an Etsy seller who sold them to me.