FYI …

… How personal letters built the possibility of a modern public | Aeon Essays. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… the earliest forms for public discussion of politics and literature in print presented themselves as epistolary conversations. Rather than negating the personalising effects of handwritten correspondence, they relied on them to make new forms of print seem familiar and understandable. The ‘print public sphere’ made its debut as a series of letters.