What is a mail club?

How a mail club works

• You subscribe online and pay monthly, much like a magazine.
• Each month the club posts you an envelope rather than a box: flat things that fit through a letterbox. A letter or a story, an art print or a postcard, a bookmark, a zine, a puzzle.
• Most are made by one person or a small team, who design, print and pack every issue themselves.
• You can usually cancel at any time, and many let you send it to someone else as a gift.

Mail club or subscription box?

A subscription box sends things; a mail club sends paper. A box needs a courier and someone at home to take it in. A mail club goes through the letterbox with an ordinary stamp, which keeps it cheaper and keeps the attention on what’s printed: the writing, the pictures, and the small pleasure of opening real post.

What kinds of mail club are there?

• Art and illustration: a print or postcard each month, often with a letter or stickers. The most common kind.
• Stories told in letters: a serial written as correspondence, so you read along as the characters write to you.
• Nature: plants, birds, fungi or sea creatures, with prints and notes to learn from.
• History: reproduced letters, documents or newspapers from the past.
• Puzzles and mysteries: clues to work through, often a case that unfolds over several months.
• Pen pals and stationery: paper, envelopes and prompts to get you writing back.

An old idea

On 10 January 1840 Britain brought in the Uniform Penny Post: a letter could go anywhere in the country for a penny. Before then postage was charged by the sheet and the distance, which is why some writers filled a page, turned it a quarter turn and wrote on across their own lines. They called it a crossed letter.

The Victorians also read in instalments. Dickens’s novels came out in monthly parts, and readers waited a month for each one. A mail club is that pleasure revived: something worth waiting for, a month at a time.

Why people love them

• Something real arrives, instead of something else on a screen.
• It’s a reason to slow down: to sit with a cup of tea and read.
• A series gives you something to follow, and something to collect.
• It makes a gift that keeps arriving, long after the day itself.

Giving a mail club as a gift

Put the other person’s name and address as the delivery address when you subscribe, and the gift arrives every month. To give a set number of months, cancel once you’ve paid for them: they’ll still get every issue you’ve paid for.

Our mail clubs

Crossed Letter publishes three, each sending something original from the past, with a short note on what we know now.

• Nature Printed: two rare species a month, as the old naturalists drew them. Open now.
• The Packet: Shackleton’s Endurance expedition in twelve monthly dispatches, in his own words. First dispatch planned for January 2027.
• Gaslight: the news of this month exactly 150 years ago, set as a Victorian newspaper. First issue planned for November 2026.