Book Review: The Postal Age

Henkin, David M., The Postal Age. Chicago: Chicago Press, 2006.
“Many of us may not realize that what we now call snail mail was once just as revolutionary as e-mail and text messages are today.” Today’s generation may not be quite aware of the long journey Americans have traveled from the Postal Age up to what we now call the Information Age. As an examination of the rise of the American postal system in the middle decades of the 19th century, David M Henkin’s, The Postal Age offers up a fascinating blend of intellectual and thematic history. In his book, Henkin highlights new practices and new expectations as ordinary Americans swiftly turned something novel into something normal-into habit, into culture.
The physical layout of the book certainly prepares the reader for it contents. The cover shows what appears a very busy Post Office in which people are climbing atop one another to receive their mail. Henkin lays out his book in two sections. “Joining a Network,” points the basic practical details of the spread of the postal system, how and what people mailed. The second section, “Postal Intimacy,” takes a more cultural approach towards common letter-writing styles and clichés, the post as a lens for growing geographic mobility, and the rise of mass mailings.
My initial response was admiration. I was genuinely impressed at the flow of Henkin’s book and his ability to create flux not only in every introduction but also throughout the book in its entirety. Henkin used an anecdote about a man named Anthony Burns to launch into the cultural transformation that had taken place over the past decades that made the story possible. I particularly appreciated his second chapter, “Mailable Matters,” which discussed what exactly it is that people mailed at that time and how it evolved. Precisely, the history of transient newspapers, or