In 2013, novelist Jon McGregor invited strangers to send him a letter in the post.

He was taking up a creative writing teaching job at the University of Nottingham and he wanted to encourage the students to think about writing in ways that didn’t involve blank sheets of paper or screens.

He wanted them to think about other people’s writing before they started to think about their own, and decided that a good way of doing this would be to set up a literary journal and have the students produce it; reading the submissions, making selections, putting each issue together.

The Guardian reported that the scribbled notes and love letters are still landing on his doormat.

From all those letters, he started the Letters Page, loose-leaf reproductions of the original handwritten letters, alongside an illustrated booklet of transcriptions. And several more later on.

Here is one such anthology of letters.

Photo by Joanna Kosinska on Unsplash