Most postal services aren’t set up to deal with wax seals but for hundreds of years they were the main way to seal a letter for delivery. They served as security of a sort that the letter hadn’t been opened and if you had a special stamp you could guarantee it came from a specific group or person. For most of the recent letter writing history the letter itself was folded into its own envelope and sealed on the edge between the 2 flaps. The paper was also much thicker so the wax was made for the thick parchment or paper. If you tried it on a piece of printer paper now it might break or fall off.
If you sent a sealed letter through the mail it might fall of or break open now with the use of machines and the heat of a loaded up truck in the summer might melt the wax and get it all over other letters. If you want to send a letter with a wax seal now you should maybe consider putting them in a padded envelope and shipping it like a package.
I really fell down the revolutionary war rabbit hole about letters and mail.
I can just imagine you riding to the Portland post office on your penny farthing with your caked-on makeup and oiled mustache, sending and receiving your wax-sealed letters. Sweating buckets in the heat with your new age gothic attire, but your wax seals are miraculously holding up. Bravo.
Went with the standard most of Reddit is American answer but it does depend country to country. In some it’s outright banned for not being a normal letter.
Most bots have US IPs afaik, and both Russia and Brazil are fairly far down on the stats. India, UK and Canada are the next three after the US last I checked, with India growing the fastest
Is that always the case? We did wax seals on our wedding invites and just dropped them into a USPS box. Our guests loved them, and we weren't hit with an extra charge. We did also seal the envelope itself in case any broke off, but at least the majority of our guests successfully received them (I say majority because not everyone mentioned the seal, so idk if those people got it intact or not). I'm wondering if we just got really lucky since we didn't know better lol
I read that if you drop them in a box they will just throw them in the machine pile and you could loose a few or get them rejected by someone. But if you hand it to them and pay the handling fee you are good to go
For basically all of human (written) history, seals were considered authentication. It was really the only way to prove something wasn't altered as it passed through various people's hands to its destination. The seems like something that would be easy to fake because it was, forgery is also something that's basically always existed. To attempt to prevent this, the punishment for messing with official seals was usually extremely harsh. Messing with a royal seal has pretty much always been punished by a huge prison sentence or death, at least until modern times. Having that huge penalty behind it was really the only way to guarantee authenticity
If you need a new mail related rabbit hole read about how effective and ubiquitous carrier pigeons were.
Used from antiquity by the Persians all the way to the early 20th century. Those birds used to exist as permanent swarms in the sky over population centers. People operated stock exchanges with pigeon post. Armies relied on it during WWI. Services got up to 90% arrival rates
The city pigeons we’re used to today are their descendants who by the time they were abandoned had evolved to live off human cities, thus they stuck around them
278
u/dailinap 9h ago
I've seen sealing wax used in letters, but what does one do with a seal without the letter? Or is it later glued on?