Letterjoy vs History By Mail: A Comparison
Prospective customers sometimes ask our support team how we compare to Historybymail.com. On this page, we lay out the highlights of the Letterjoy difference.
What sets Letterjoy apart?
TL;DR
The short version of it is that Letterjoy puts in the work to make sure we offer the most educational & fun letter subscription on the market.
We do that by poring through offline archives in our home city, Washington, D.C., to find amazing letters, carefully researching each selection, and painstakingly recreating design details in each letter to make sure every letter you receive is beautiful.
We use high-quality papers made in the USA and a real postage stamp to mail every letter.
We also do our design and customer service in-house, to make sure that we hit our internal quality bar.
The Longer Version
Ownership & Experience
Letterjoy was founded in Illinois in 2017 by entrepreneur Michael Sitver while studying for his undergraduate degree at the University of Chicago. We remain proudly American-owned and operated.
Curation & Research
Letterjoy’s Washington, D.C. office is located within a half hour’s walk of the National Archives, the Smithsonian, and the manuscript reading room of the Library of Congress.
Proximity to great archives and access to brilliant archivists and historians allows us to find undiscovered gems to share with you. It takes countless hours of work to pore through offline records, and assemble our findings into a four-letter monthly theme that tells the story, but we think the results are worth it.
Design & Readability
Every Letterjoy letter is carefully designed to recreate the experience of receiving the original letter, while maintaining readability. To do this, we work with an outstanding professional design team to restore faded letterhead, signatures, and other design details and carefully lay out each letter for print.
History By Mail seems to mainly print photo copies of existing letters (as seen in their sample letter).
Choice & Selection
Whether you dream of writing the next great novel, running for office, or pitching your product on Shark Tank, Letterjoy has a collection for you.
We offer a growing list of topic-specific collections that allow you you to personalize your historic letter adventure. Current collections include Great Authors, American History, Military History, Science & Innovation, Stoicism, and more.
Writing
When you order Letterjoy, you get more than just weekly letters. You also get detailed and interesting articles about each letter. Our “postscript” articles are researched and written by a team of experts with degrees from some of the nation’s finest universities, including the University of Chicago, the University of Texas at Austin, and Georgetown University.
Meanwhile, Historic Mail’s letters include only brief commentary of uncertain origins (Once again, they’re based in China)
Paper & Postage
At Letterjoy, we believe that every element of your experience deserves careful attention. Letterjoy letters arrive at your door on a variety of fine stationeries and parchment-style papers of varying hues and textures, tailored to your letter and, for the most part, milled in the United States.
And we don’t just stop at the paper in tailoring your experience. Each of our letters is mailed to you in a sturdy cream or ivory-colored envelope made in Wisconsin or upstate New York, and sent to your door with a real First-Class stamp.
We consistently monitor paper and print quality to assure we're hitting our quality bar. To our knowledge, History By Mail outsources their mailing.
Customer Service
Letterjoy’s customer service team is US-based, with customer satisfaction scores above 90%.
Weekly Surprises
Letterjoy is the only weekly historic letter service on the market. With Letterjoy, your history buff canreceive an interesting piece of mail not just monthly, but weekly. With History By Mail or Historic Mail, they'd receive a letter only once a month.
Prefer less frequent letters? Join our Codebreaking Club for one secret coded message from history each month.
We think the choice between Letterjoy and History By Mail is pretty clear, but if you still aren’t certain, read our sample letters!
Who and What Will You Discover With The Letterjoy Experience?
With our letter subscriptions, you'll travel through history’s most pivotal moments, spanning from the birth of the nation in 1776 all the way up to the 1976 Bicentennial. Along the way, you’ll encounter the words of presidents, scientists, inventors, and change-makers, from George Washington to Amelia Earhart.
We dive deep into eras and movements that shaped America and the world, bringing you correspondence from a diverse array of figures: statesmen, innovators, wartime leaders, and voices that are sometimes overlooked in textbooks.
Every letter serves not just as a window into a particular figure, but also into the fascinating historical moment they inhabited.
Each subscription explores historical moments one theme at a time, allowing you to see the bigger picture by piecing together correspondence from across different decades, centuries, and corners of society.
Whether it’s the revolution, the invention age, or the rise of civil rights, these letters reveal both prominent and lesser-known voices that helped make history what it is today.