Friendship Books

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Inspired by a discussion with @RebeccasFarm ... I was just taking a trip down memory lane. When I was a pre-teen, teen, and even up into my young adult years I was avidly into pen pals. At one time I had 80. Postage got quite expensive. But for a young person living miles away from any town, being homeschooled without extended family around - penpalling was a sanity saver for sure. So, one thing we would do - in order to get more pen pals - were friendship books. It was kind of like a chain letter type thing. Someone started it. A little envelope friendly booklet. They put their name and address, age, hobbies in it. Then sent it it their pen pal, who would do the same. Then that person would send it on to their pen pals, etc... and the idea was that when it was full it would come back to the person who started it. I must have started dozens of them. Only a couple came back ever. If you didn't want more pen pals, it was typical to say something like "Faye from MN, USA : Says Hi!" so that the original person could see where all it had traveled to. There were variations on a theme. The basics were FBs "friendship books", but there were also SLAMS (you answered questions on the pages) and Lyrics (you put your info and favorite song lyrics). We even had our own shorthand W/S = Write Soon and T/C = Take Care -- there were others but I forget them Of course, now it seems like a bad idea. All ages seemed to put entries in FBs - but for the most part it was dominated by the 13-17 group. Names and addresses of underage folks rapidly circulating could easily get into the wrong hands. But then, this was the 90s. For the photo in this post I actually had replicated a "typical" FB entry that my teen age self wrote out countless times. As you see - decorating with markers, stickers and the like was common place. Some people got a lot fancier, and some people were barely readable. Colored pens, gel pens, makers, rubber stamps, stickers confetti ahhhh the nostalgia of it all....