People keep letters?

Actually: people write letters?

It was pretty common for people to save letters in my parents' and grandparents' generation. When my grandmother died we found hundreds of them.

I went through a phase a few years ago where I actually wrote people letters. Since my friends are all over the globe, it sort of made sense. I did it because I personally liked the feeling of receiving a letter. The conclusion, after sending 20 letters to several people, was that receiving one is great but more often than not the person receiving it would thank me online and not write back on paper.

If there were a super-fast, cheap way to send paper letters, I'd communicate this way when it was anything personal.

> If there were a super-fast, cheap way to send paper letters

Don't they call that a "printer"?

More seriously, I haven't seen "Her", but isn't that the profession of its protagonist? -- hand-writing paper letters as a service, that is. Perhaps there's a market there, but I sort of doubt it; it seems to me that almost all the unique value of sending a hand-written letter would be absent in a case where the actual process of writing was farmed out to some random stranger.

The letter archives of people in history are a source of lots of useful historical information.

People almost never write personal letters today, but yep, when it was common, people often kept them.

How do you think most of your history books were written?