When I was a teenager living overseas – in Hungary and China, among other random places – all I did was spend all day writing letters. I wrote my friends back home to hear about the latest music I was missing out on, to describe how there was no public toilet paper in Hungarian bathrooms, or to explain what sea slug tasted like to my friends in land-locked Minnesota. I wrote hella lot of letters. Many were 8-10 pages long.

Actual letters. With paper. And pens. And envelopes. And stamps?! The ones you licked, didn’t just stick.

I don’t know how many post-office lines I stood in while in China and Hungary. The Posta was almost a daily stop in 1993 and 1994. Most of the mail I received in Beijing, back in 1991, was pre-opened and read. It always cracked me up thinking of a PLA English translator deciphering 8th-grade humor from my friends back home. “Nathan and Bruno got into a fight after school at the Rock. Nathan looked nervous but caught Bruno on the chin early. It drew blood. But this enraged Bruno. He charged at Nathan and brought him down to the ground. They clawed at each other and threw elbows before a teacher showed up and I took off with a bunch of others.” That’s paraphrasing one letter to me from a friend Darren while I was in China. This was pre-internet. These communiques were riveting! I won’t mention what I wrote back – it was much worse. What happens in the Polish Embassy at teenage pool parties stays in the Polish Embassy. 😉

For years, I had friends scattered around the world, and getting mail was genuinely exciting. You’d check the mailbox and occasionally there would be something in it that had crossed an ocean specifically for you. Pretty amazing, really. Phone calls?! Get serious. Calling my friend Sam in New Zealand would have been about $2 a minute – or $36 in contemporary dollars (estimated).

Now? I have to practically force myself to sit down and write anyone a letter longhand. I have done it in the last year. I tend to type them now, though, on my typewriter. My handwriting has deteriorated into something between cartographic annotation and a medical prescription, and after about half a page my hand starts wondering what it did to deserve this. Typing still feels authentic – typewriter buttons are heavy! – and it still requires finding an envelope, postage, and mailbox. (More difficult every year.) I like knowing that there is only a single copy of what I have written and sent. If the person keeps it, it’s truly valuable – information that can be destroyed at a moment’s notice or used to bring me down my political career someday. (Oh wait… this blog has already done that? Okay… well…)

I do miss those simpler times of letter writing. But Would I go back? Absolutely not.

First of all, I’m not a teenager anymore. I don’t have hours and hours to write letters. I suppose I would if I didn’t have a “smart” phone and streaming services, but I do, so I would rather be lonely watching lowest common denominator programming, apparently, than writing a friend a thought-out and fun letter. I guess that says a lot about how the world has changed, and I with it, over the past 20 years. Wow… kind of sad. But it’s true! After all, I have to finish the Smallville television series, which I missed while writing letters decades ago.

Letter writing was a lot like film photography (cue my map from a couple of weeks ago): wonderfully tangible, deliberate, and romantic in hindsight – but also expensive in time, travel, and money. You needed paper, envelopes, stamps, a mailbox or post office, and patience. Sometimes lots of patience. I would write my mom in the US from Hungary, know it would take at least seven days for the letter to arrive, and then another day or two for my mum to have time to compose a letter back, and another seven days for the latter to return. It was a 16-18 day communication circle. I try to imagine my 17-year old daughter putting up with that today… if I don’t text back within a couple of hours, it’s insulting. Digital communication is objectively easier but has also caused a lot more stress – for everyone.

I realized about a month ago that my kids don’t even really know how to send a letter. Literally: they’ve never had to do it. That kind of shocked me. Coupled with the fact that Denmark (often a trend-setter when it comes to efficiency) just got rid of the ability to send letters via post, it’s safe to assume the end of analog letter writing is nigh. In other words, like using a phone book, I won’t bother teaching my kids how to navigate the postal system unless they ask.

So for International Letter Writing Day, I decided to explore a small but fundamental part of the analog letter-writing ritual: what does it actually cost to mail a letter domestically? How does this vary around the world?

I used Spatial Data Creator to compile the dataset and make it as I wanted. I then used Web Mapper to create a map of it.

The map shows domestic postage costs where I could find reasonably usable data, keeps countries without data visible, and lets you explore the price distribution interactively.

To give it that antiquarian feel, and to appear more analog than the map really is, I also used the early-twentieth century German school atlas map style. Very minimalist and square. And perfectly analog for the theme. The histogram is kind of neat. The topic is fun. And it’s a map.

Maybe after looking at it I’ll write someone a letter. Right after I finish Smallville…

View early twentieth-century German school-atlas inspired map design here

Original Prompt

Hi. For International Letter Writing Day, I thought it would be fun to create a map of the average or normal cost to send a letter domestically in every country where data was readily available.

Attached is a dataset I have. Can you please use the attached style sheet to produce an interactive map, with an old-school German School Atlas-inspired interactive histogram or information chart somewhere on the map, that allows users to select countries based on the average cost and shows distribution of costs, etc.

Please visualize cost differences on the map. On mobile devices you may exclude the interactive chart/diagram, but it must be present on desktop. Also, please omit subtitles, etc.

Title the map: Domestic Postage Costs around the World

In the sources modal, please mention Cartographer: Ian Muehlenhaus, and also include a link to the map provenance file.

Do not use “Legend” as the title of any legend. Be creative and have fun vcisualizing this. Do not let the user zoom out into space. Allow the user to zoom in on the map to see more detail at a resonable level – not all the way to a neighborhood, naturally.

Choose an appropriate API for thematic visualization.

Thank you!

Audience: general global public.

P.S. Many countries are missing data. Don’t omit them completely. Make them appear neutral somehow, using the style-guide as a reference. Thanks.