Before Envelopes, People Protected Messages With Letterlocking

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Having to do with writing more than books, but PG found this fascinating.

From Atlas Obscura:

Around 2 a.m. on February 8, 1587, Mary Queen of Scots penned a letter to her brother-in-law, King Henri III of France. It would be her last. Six hours later, she was beheaded for treason by order of her cousin, Elizabeth I of England. The letter has since become one of Scotland’s most beloved artifacts, the handwritten pages offering a poignant glimpse of a monarch grappling with her impending execution.

But it’s not the words that fascinate Jana Dambrogio, the Thomas F. Peterson conservator at MIT Libraries. For more than a decade, Dambrogio has been studying “letterlocking,” the various systems of folds, slits, and wax seals that protected written communication before the invention of the mass-produced envelope. To guard her final missive from prying eyes, the queen used a “butterfly lock”—one of hundreds of techniques catalogued by Dambrogio, collaborator Daniel Starza Smith, and their research team in a fast-growing dictionary of letterlocking.

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Mary was not the only person of note to lock her letters: Fellow practitioners include Galileo, Machiavelli, Marie Antoinette, the Boston philanthropist Isabella Gardner, and the artist Albrecht Dürer. “Everyone was doing it,” notes Smith, a lecturer in the department of English at King’s College London. “It is something that underlies the history of communication for hundreds of years, and it’s kind of mind-blowing.”

To seal a modern-day envelope (on the off chance you’re sealing an envelope at all), it takes a lick or two, at most. Not so for Mary or for Machiavelli. In those days, letters were folded in such a way that they served as their own envelope. Depending on your desired level of security, you might opt for the simple, triangular fold and tuck; if you were particularly ambitious, you might attempt the dagger-trap, a heavily booby-trapped technique disguised as another, less secure, type of lock.

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Dambrogio first encountered locked letters in 2000, in the conservation lab of the Vatican Secret Archives. Her fellowship project involved a careful study of legal and accounting records spanning the 10th to 17th centuries, all of which had survived virtually untouched. By the end of the first week, she says, “I had already started to see slits and authentication marks and really beautiful wax seals and cut-off corners and folds—folds in books, folds in books of papers, folds everywhere.”

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Both researchers are adamant, however, that there is still so much left to uncover. Many questions remain: How, for instance, did John Donne and Queen Elizabeth I’s spymaster know the same letterlocking techniques? Were they passed down from a parent or from a colleague? Did certain locks imply something about the content of the letter?

There is evidence that suggests letterlocking might have been seen as a reflection of personality and taste. Smith points to [John] Donne as a particularly telling example. “He’s using five different letterlocking styles, and one of them—despite the fact that we’ve looked at nearly a million letters, a quarter of a million in detail—we’ve never seen anyone else use it,” Smith says. “So we’ve got this guy who’s known as the most inventive and witty poet of his generation, and he’s doing one of the most inventive and witty and brilliant letterlocking methods you could imagine. That is the kind of evidence you can use to say ‘Ah, so, you can actually see something of people’s personalities in the way they fold letters.’”

Link to the rest at Atlas Obscura

Here’s how Mary, Queen of Scots letterlocked her last letter.

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