“A letter posted in London before 10 o’clock could reach its recipient in the country by dinner time the same day.”                                                                       

This nugget of information comes from “Bloomsbury at Home,” a wonderful book chronicling life in the various homes of the impossibly talented Bloomsbury set, circa late 19th century, early 20th, one of those bygone eras of mucho letter writing for sure.  

I know, I know, today we tweet and text and that prose is delivered in lightening speed that would leave the stunned Dowager Countess of Grantham grasping for her smelling salts. But check this out. Here’s a couple, profiled on a recent  “Sunday Morning” (CBS) segment, who may not be into letter-writing, but they’ve managed to create a digital literary keepsake that harkens back to the good old days, sort of. It’s not exactly a diary of letters –  Patrick Geraghty and Kristie Damell never wrote letters to one another, but a 21st century slant on one. “We had a whole history by text,” Patrick noted. So, this paragon of a husband printed those text messages (from the day they first met through their first anniversary) had them bound in a hardcover album (below) and presented it to Kristie on anniversary No. 1.  Anymore where he came from?

Now, something for the small fry. How cute is this! The name, the colors. Fab.

Turtle Mail is a small wooden toy mailbox (above) for kids that prints messages sent via Wi-Fi from its web or desktop app. The idea came when one of the founders, Alysia Finger, noticed that when her daughter turned one-year-old, for gifts she was getting “really flashy electronics that felt like they were built for adults and just wrapped in rubber and plastic and marketed as kids products.” A word to the wise: “What I heard over and over during my interviews with parents and caregivers,” Finger told “Wired” magazine, “is that they were exhausted with screen time, apps, and video games…Many expressed how hard it was to get their kids off of computers and tablets.” Gee, what a surprise…For more about Turtle Mail go to: http://aedreams.com/turtle-mail/.