Snail Mail

             No one definitively knows who first coined the term “snail mail.” More than likely it wasn’t Hans Rey, but a letter written to his wife Margret in July 1971 caused me to wonder. At the time I was working at the de Grummond Collection. The curator, Dee Jones, had selected various artifacts from the Rey literary estate for digitization and the image of Hans’ “snail mail” letter was one of those chosen to be imbedded in the online finding aid.

            The text of Hans’ letter was mundane—a simple note to his wife about a list she needed. Worried that Margret would not receive the information she had requested in time, Hans wrote, “In case I don’t get around to writing you tomorrow, or the mail being even slower than usual, here’s the shopping list on a separate sheet.” To emphasize his pique at the slowness of the mail from rural New Hampshire to rural Maine where Margret was attending a pottery workshop, Hans drew a red, white, and blue snail dragging a U.S. mail bag behind its shell.

Letter from Hans Rey to Margret Rey, dated July 6, 1971
McCain Library and Archives
University of Southern Mississippi

            Where did the term “snail mail” originate, I wondered? How far back did use of the term go? Certainly, Hans’ 1971 letter predated e-mail, or so I thought. I posed my question to a Usenet list-serv in December 2002. Almost immediately, a kind computer scientist at the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California responded. He referred me to the Random House Word of the Day for October 20, 2000, that referenced the term in The Hacker’s Dictionary (Steele, 1983). Yet, sadly, no mention of the term’s origin was given.

            I repeated my question to a friend, who happens to be an editor with an encyclopedic memory. He told me that the term may even go back to the invention of the telegraph. Evidently,  an 1840 article in the Philadelphia North American newspaper comparing the slowness of overland mail delivery to the new telegraph proclaimed, "The markets will no longer be dependent upon snail paced [sic] mails." Since then, a 1969 tongue-in-cheek piece titled “Post Office Considers Ways to Worsen Service,” written by The New York Times' famous humor columnist Russell Baker has been unearthed. “There is a long tradition at the Post Office which its planning department hates to break,” Baker wrote. “Traditionally every time the price of mailing a letter goes up a penny, the Post Office devises a new scheme for making service even worse than it was before…. With the last rise, when postage went to 6 cents, [the department] devised the intricate system known as ‘snail mail.’”  Perhaps Baker’s article had popularized the term and inspired Hans’ 1971 drawing.

            Curiously, that same year—1971—another Bostonian was also searching for a faster way to communicate with colleagues who didn’t return his phone calls. Ray Tomlinson, a computer scientist at BBN Technologies in Cambridge, wanted to send an electronic message from his computer to another computer using the Arpanet network, an early version of today’s Internet. Tomlinson’s problem was how to address the message so that it would be received by a specific person on a computer used by several people. As William F. Allman writes in Smithsonian, “Tomlinson’s eyes fell on @, poised above “P” on his Model 33 teletype…. Using his naming system, he sent himself an e-mail, which travelled from one teletype in his room, through Arpanet, and back to a different teletype machine [in the same room].”

            Tomlinson told NPR in 2009 that he can’t remember what he wrote in that first e-mail. “The first e-mail is completely forgettable, and therefore forgotten.” As for his choice of the @, a symbol which dates back to the 16th century, “The @ sign just made sense; it wasn’t commonly used in computing back then, so there wouldn’t be too much confusion. The symbol turns an e-mail address into a phrase. It means ‘user at host.’”

The originator of the term “snail mail" may be lost to history, but even those who used the term as a synonym for posted mail prior to the invention of electronic mail, could not have foreseen its ubiquity in the jargon of 21st century conversation. Tomlinson’s use of the @ symbol in e-mail created the pretext for the term “snail mail” to become synonymous with posted mail, but ironically, the symbol itself foreshadowed the decline of surface mail delivery. For as William Allman tells us, the @ is “called a ‘snail’ by Italians,” and more interestingly for fans of H. A. Rey's most famous character, George, a ‘monkey tail’ by the Dutch. How curious is that?

Where's Charcoal?

 

Hans Rey with Charcoal, c. 1944
McCain Library & Archives
University of Southern Mississippi



            Most people associate the names Hans and Margret Rey with a curious little monkey named George. However, when Charcoal, a small black cocker spaniel, joined the family in 1942, “Charkie” became a regular feature in Margret and Hans Rey’s children’s books. Charcoal was also included on the couple’s annual New Year’s card. Click the dates below to see two of these cards posted on January 10, 2012 and March 9, 2012.  
            The Reys befriended an assortment of animals during the 42 years they were together—marmoset monkeys in Brazil, turtles in Paris, and a tamed chipmunk at their summer home in New Hampshire.

Margret and Charcoal in the park, c. 1944
McCain Library and Archives
University of Southern Mississippi

            “Animals have always played an important part in our lives,” Hans is quoted as saying. Animals were important, both personally and professionally. “We live off the profits of ‘monkey business,’” he added wryly.

            Want to play “Where’s Charcoal?”  The next time you visit the children’s department in your local public library, check out The Complete Adventures of Curious George (Houghton Mifflin, 2001). Beginning with Curious George Takes a Job, count how many times you can “spy” Charcoal in the background. One hint: Curious George Learns the Alphabet doesn’t have any dogs pictured, but there are lots of other animals to see. How many different animals can you find?

Washington Square Park



© Ann Mulloy Ashmore 2012

      “The Village is New York to me,” Hans once told a reporter for The Villager newspaper in 1962.  If Greenwich Village was their neighborhood, Washington Square Park was their front yard. It was where they walked their black cocker spaniel, Charcoal, where Hans sat and read his morning papers, where the couple greeted friends walking to and from shops and restaurants. In less than a year after their arrival in the United States, the couple had settled into an apartment located at 42 Washington Square South. Their front window faced the park with a view of the stately Greek Revival homes along its northern boundary and the Washington Arch, erected in 1889 from a design by noted architect,

© Ann Mulloy Ashmore 2012

Stanford White. Land for the park had been acquired by the city in 1795. Originally used as a Potter's Field, or burial ground for the poor, it was converted into a parade ground in 1826. Subsequently, New Yorkers began to build townhouses along its perimeter. The first fountain appeared in 1852, and over the years various statues and monuments have been added. Today the park serves as a "quad" for New York University (NYU) whose buildings, (noted in blue in the image below) almost completely surround it on three sides. In 1949, when NYU claimed the southwestern corner of  Washington Square South for its new law school, the Reys were forced to relinquish their park side home and move a few blocks away to 82 Washington Place.

 



 

42 Washington Square South

McCain Library and Archives
University of Southern Mississippi

1945 New Years Card



“We came to the U. S. A. with the idea that it was a progressive and liberal country,” Margret Rey recalled shortly after the couple became citizens in 1946.  In the six years they had called New York home, the couple published twenty children’s books. 

“We had prepared ourselves for a difficult start,” Hans added,  “but fate was kind—within a month four of the manuscripts I had brought along were accepted for publication.”          

The Reys chose New York for several reasons. First, Margret’s sister, Mary Waldstein Eichenberg, and her husband had lived on Long Island since the mid-1930s. Second, Hans knew the city. Prior to immigrating to Rio de Janeiro, he spent several months working in the New York office of his brother-in-laws’ import-export firm. Finally, New York was the epicenter for trade publishing, and the Reys were determined to make their mark.

Within months of their arrival, the couple had found an apartment on Washington Square, in Greenwich Village. Like many authors and artists before them, the aesthetics of The Village—its irregular streets, classical architecture, diverse cultural life—seeped into their souls. Hans featured their third floor walk-up on South Square in the couple’s 1945 New Year’s card, and in a small sketch depicting its interior.

McCain Library and Archives
University of Southern Mississippi



Here they entertained family and friends, listened to music, argued over politics, chatted about movies and reviews in The New York Times. Ironically, their biggest success, the Curious George series, was with a Boston-based publishing house, Houghton Mifflin. Yet for nearly a quarter of a century, the Reys (and Curious George) roamed the streets of New York, rode its subways and buses, and called it home. George liked to ride on top of the bus. Don’t believe me? Re-read Curious George Takes a Job. You’ll see them all on 5th Avenue—George, riding the bus, Hans in a blue suit walking beside his friend and author, Jesse Jackson (Call Me Charley, 1945), and Margret with Charcoal, their black cocker spaniel, a little to the right greeting a four-legged friend.

Happy New Year!  1942

 by Ann Mulloy Ashmore

McCain Library and Archives
University of Southern Mississippi
1942 New Year's Card

     “The Statue of Liberty greeted us through the morning mist,” Hans recalled. It was a cold, crisp October day in 1940 when the ship bringing the Reys to New York from Rio de Janeiro sailed past Lady Liberty. Fifty-four years earlier, on another foggy October day, President Grover Cleveland dedicated the statue, a gift from the people of France to the people of the United States, with these words: “We will not forget that Liberty has here made her home, nor shall her chosen altar be neglected. Willing votaries will constantly keep alive its fires and these shall gleam upon the shores of our sister Republic thence, and joined with answering rays a stream of light shall pierce the darkness of ignorance and man's oppression, until Liberty enlightens the world.”

But in 1940, “our sister Republic” could only remember with longing the sweetness of liberty and freedom. Crushed beneath the boot heel of the Nazi war machine, the fires of Liberty’s torch no longer gleamed on the shores of occupied France, a fact Hans and Margret Rey knew only too well.  Since June of that year, they had been on the run. First, escaping on bicycles as the German army marched into Paris. Later, avoiding a narrow brush with authorities on the Spanish border on their way to Lisbon, and passage to Brazil. As Louise Borden has written in The Journey that Saved Curious George, ironically, it was the pictures of the loveable monkey that Hans carried in his knapsack that saved the day.

Mississippians, young and old, will soon be able to view Hans’ 1942 New Year’s greeting card when the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson hosts Curious George Saves the Day: The Art of Margret and H. A. Rey exhibit March 3 through July 22, 2012.  Until then,  visit your local library and read more about the Reys in “Curious About Them: Reliving the Magnificent  Margret and H. A. Rey” in the Winter 2010 issue of Children & Libraries. The llustrated, full-text article is provided through Mississippi’s MAGNOLIA  Academic Search Premier database.  



Holiday Wishes!
 by Ann Mulloy Ashmore

Ann Mulloy Ashmore 1999

         Christmas came early to the de Grummond Children’s Literature Collection in 1999. At the beginning of the year boxes began arriving from Boston—boxes containing the literary estate of Margret and H. A. Rey. As staff unpacked and documented treasure after treasure, it was clear the Reys and Curious George had given the University of Southern Mississippi an unbelievable gift—the legacy of 42 years of creative collaboration. By fall semester it was time to share the Reys’ gift with the university community and the public at large.  “Curious George Comes to Hattiesburg: The Life and Work of H. A. and Margret Rey” opened September 1, 1999. The exhibit, designed and mounted by curator, Dee Jones, displayed more than 400 illustrations, manuscripts, photographs, diaries, letters, books, pottery, and needlepoint, as well as the original drawings for Curious George, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1941.

One could say that Curious George was quite the Santa in 1999 and as the holidays approached, Jones, an accomplished seamstress, decided the collection’s 6-foot tall stuffed Curious George needed a make-over. Previously owned by the public library in Clarksdale, Mississippi, George came to the collection wearing a pair of print overalls. After many years of children crawling into his lap for story time, the pants were a little grimy. “I thought it would be neat to have him dressed as Santa for our Holiday Book Fair that year,” Jones responded. “So I put my sewing skills to good use and whipped up his outfit.”  It took nearly five yards of red velvet and a size 4X tee shirt for a pattern, but thanks to Jones’ skill, George was dressed as Santa in time for the November event.  “The nice part was that after Christmas, we took off his hat and he was good for Valentine’s Day.”

After working 23 years at de Grummond, Jones moved to Louisiana in 2003. Today she is head of cataloging in the Department of Medical Library Science at LSUHealth in Shreveport. Still, she remembers her tenure at de Grummond with fondness. Like the day she and archives director Toby Graham had to carry George across the courtyard from the McCain Library to the Cook Library for an event, or the time the she asked him to “introduce” one of the librarians dressed in a Curious George costume handing out bananas to members of the audience at the first de Grummond Seminar funded by the Mississippi Endowment for the Humanities. “No one ever told me when I was in library school that I’d be carrying a giant monkey around,” Jones recalled the director’s remark. “At de Grummond, we always considered George things as “other duties as assigned.”

How to Spell ‘Margret’ – Let Me Count the Ways

  by Ann Mulloy Ashmore

If you wanted to provoke Margret Rey’s ire, all you had to do was spell her name incorrectly. Ursula Nordstrom, director of the Department of Books for Boys and Girls at Harper & Brothers, learned this lesson after making Margret’s acquaintance in 1941. Initially the editor addressed letters to the couple as “Mr. and Mrs. Rey.” As their friendship grew, however, Nordstrom’s salutation changed to the more familiar, “Hans and Margaret.” Margret, being Margret, complained and after several letters with the “extra a” crossed out with a pen, Nordstrom finally caught on.



McCain Library and Archives, University of Southern Mississippi



Years later Nordstrom indirectly referred to the spat in a letter to Barbara Alexandra Dicks—a letter Leonard Marcus chose to include in Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom (pp. 359-360). “I met him and Margret (correct spelling that, MARGRET) when they were refugees in the early forties….,” Nordstrom wrote. Readers may have sensed a note of pique in Nordstrom’s tone, given her emphasis on the “correct spelling,” but without the backstory, I wonder how many understood its depth?

According to Lay Lee Ong, a long-time friend, Margret first thought about dropping the “extra a” in her name as early as the 1930’s when she worked for an advertising agency in Berlin. “She wanted to be different,” wrote Ong in response to my question. It appears Margret did not put her desire into action, however, until shortly before the couple fled Paris ahead of the Nazis. 

In January 1941, just months after the Reys arrived in New York, Margret received a letter from the Banco Germanico in Rio de Janeiro. The letter, addressed to Margret Reyersbach, had been originally mailed to their apartment in Paris.  At the time her legal name was Margarete Elisabeth Reyersbach, but Margret’s return letter dated February 9, 1941, was signed Margret Reyersbach.  This is the earliest documented spelling of her name without the “extra a” that I have found, thus far.

This wasn’t the first time Margret had changed her name. Her given name was Margarethe (mar gar EH tuh), the Danish form of Margaret, which she used throughout her school years. By 1927 she had dropped the “h” and eight years later, Margarete Elisabeth  Waldstein became Frau Reyersbach upon her marriage to Hans in August 1935. A digital copy of their wedding announcement is available on the de Grummond Collection Web site.  Sometime after 1941 the couple legally changed their last name to Rey. At that moment Margarete Elisabeth Waldstein Reyersbach became Margret Rey—short, to the point, direct—a name befitting the author and businesswoman she had become. “Margret wanted to be different,” her friend Lay Lee mused, “That she was, and how!”