You’ve Got Mail: A glimpse at the beauty and quirks behind letter writing 

SINGAPORE: Featuring artefacts such as elaborately adorned handcrafted envelopes and the world’s first stamp embedded with Swarovski crystals, a nine-month long exhibition at the Singapore Philatelic Museum (SPM) seeks to showcase the beauty of letter writing, a lost art in these modern days of the Internet and advancing technology.

You’ve Got Mail!, a two-part exhibition, took eight years to come to fruition, with the museum working with private collectors around the world.

Beginning Wednesday (Apr 11), the exhibition will take visitors back to the days of snail mail, with 200 hand decorated envelopes and 150 unusual stamps on display.

The aim? To inspire people to write letters and encourage them to send mail the traditional way again. 

“In this digital age, we use our phones or other mobile devices to send messages, but these are intangible because if you change your phone, the messages are gone,” said Ms Lucille Yap, a senior curator at SPM. 

“We want to inspire people to pick up a pen and start writing letters to their friends and loved ones again.”

The first segment will showcase award-winning handcrafted envelopes from the Washington Calligraphers Guild’s annual Graceful Envelope Contests.

The second segment will illustrate how innovate stamp design and printing technology have transformed the regular square and  rectangular stamps into multi-sensory stamps that come with various scents, textures and even sound. 

The exhibition will run till Dec 31.