The royal mail: its curiosities and romance
The Royal Mail: Its Curiosities and Romance is a Victorian popular history of the British postal service by James Wilson Hyde, published in Edinburgh by W. Blackwood and Sons in 1885 for a general reading public. Its pictures are cheerful pen-and-ink vignettes of letters addressed to people in odd situations, such as a man playing a guitar at a chair, a figure in a hoop skirt, and a boy riding an ostrich, with a sideways wood-engraved scene at the end. A designer might take from them the loose, humorous line style of Victorian wood-engraved ephemera and the comic use of address labels as a visual device.
