The original inbox

The traffic on our country road moves at a fairly steady speed, so it wasn’t until my sons were seven or eight that they were allowed to collect the mail. When they were finally permitted to make the short walk from the porch to the mailbox, it was a passage that represented not only their growing recognition of the complexities of the world outside the door but also a journey towards identity. The first time they encountered a card in the mailbox addressed to them, they understood that this was a place where news of the world arrived and, better yet, news that arrived with their names on it.

Certainly, most of the mailboxes in my neighbourhood live up to this task. While many of them are standard sheet-metal or plastic, others make for a catalogue of decorative sensibilities. Architecture has a foothold here. One is in the shape of a small red barn, another is sheathed in weathered clapboards, others have shingled roofs. Some have simply been painted in cheery colours – forest green, rose pink, purple. One has a small, faux folk painting, a Holstein grazing in a pasture. Still others have incorporated objects that speak to the rural past; they are propped up in milking cans or set on an old, wrought-iron sewing stand.

But even those mailboxes that have no aspiration to the decorative bear some imprint of their owner, whether through plain work-a-day efficiency or sheer, unapologetic neglect. One of my favourites is a twisted, rusty metal box, askew on an old pole; its varying hues of rust, evocative dents and precarious tilt are all testimony that the house down the driveway could have been the childhood home of sheet-metal sculptor Richard Serra.

Cal Swann is an English graphic designer and professor who has documented the mailboxes of rural Australia. There, he notes, the form and decoration of boxes have become their own type of folk art. Recycled milk churns, oil drums and petrol cans can all easily have mail slots cut into them and all provide a secure, waterproof depository. In his visual catalogue of such boxes, published by Pentagram Design in London under the title Nifty Places: The Australian Rural Mailbox, one finds an oil drum reinvented as a pink pig, another as a galvanised silver elephant. Some are pure whimsy, others more steadfastly industrial. Then there are the old refrigerators that have found a second life as mail and package drop boxes. All are examples not only of rural ingenuity but of the persistent decorative sensibility that invariably attends it in an unexpected landscape.

“Whatever the original motive may have been for the early settler to recycle a ready-to-hand artifact in the performance of mailbox duty,” Swann writes, “a cult has developed throughout Australia for the bizarre and often outrageous objects as mailboxes. It now has less to do with practicalities and recyling; competition is rife and efforts to make mailboxes that demonstrate individuality and humour are found in many localities.”

While such ingenious folk art might be less prevalent across rural America, it does appear sporadically. Not surprisingly, in view of the fact that design innovation so often emerges from need, some of my neighbours have fashioned larger, more substantial and secure drop boxes for overnight mail and delivery. Consider the high-concept FedEx (parcel-sized) box constructed by sculptor and furniture maker John Scofield. His lavish attention to the FedEx box extends to the prose he uses to describe the receptacle he has installed outside the door of his Connecticut home. It is, he says, “the holy tabernacle of modern secular life, the vessel keeping body and soul together better than the Noah ever did, the safe refuge for papers of transit that govern one’s existential, spiritual, nay, fiscal existence – our FedEx box!”

The aesthetic origins of Scofield’s box look to both a chicken house (“an assortment of out-house inspired appendages affording a pitiful degree of comfort and usefulness”) and a Roman architecture (“a temple of mail which mighty Hadrian would have installed on the Pantheon doors if he had expected any serious outstanding invoices”). In fact, the four-light barn sash for a door, traditionally used for windows in barns and unheated outbuildings, was outfitted with brass hinges and latch, and the roof shingled with cedar shakes and built at a 45-degree pitch, to discourage build-up of dirt or precipitation, and flashed with copper into the building to prevent rain from getting packages wet. An open-air attic is display space for beach stones, bones and other picturesque debris he and his family might pick up.

For all its ingenuity, however, Scofield’s FedEx deliverer had only qualified appreciation for the box, relegating it to the “second nicest I’ve seen”. Another customer, it seems, had constructed a box with an electric coffee­pot and a mug inside. All of which suggests that even in this era of urgent, accelerated mail delivery, there remains a time and place for the courtesies of human exchange.

Clearly, the mailbox, a little roadside cabinet printed with one’s name or address, sometimes both, is about personal identity. Inside it is the information, essential and non-essential, that defines one’s life – not only the bills and bank statements but flyers, advertisements, the series of unsolicited printed matter that in some peripheral way has an effect. Small wonder, then, that the mailbox invites attack. In rural areas, it is a rite of spring for teenagers to cruise by in cars with baseball bats and knock down mailboxes. The kids know it isn’t simple vandalism; rather, the trashed mailbox is an assault on personal identity.

A friend of mine was once a caretaker for an old farmhouse in Vermont that had once been the home of poet Robert Frost. She found Frost’s old, grey, sheet-metal mailbox still intact, set at an angle on a post that had settled comfortably into the ground after so many years, his signature hand-painted in black, its sides riddled with buckshot. I haven’t any idea whether the latter came from the town critics or just some locals who might have taken issue with Frost’s idea of what makes a good neighbour but, whether they read poetry or not, they knew a good symbol when they saw one.

Indeed, when Frost’s farm was bought years later by a Hollywood producer, the old box was replaced with a generic black box. Instead of putting his own name on it, the producer had the name of the farm elegantly stencilled there. You could argue about which of these two men had the greater celebrity, or whose work spoke to his times with more accuracy and resonance. But the producer’s decision on the new lettering reflects a distinct dilution of his own identity.

Considering these associations and the inherently public positon of mailboxes, it seems almost odd that they are used so rarely for political statement. The US Postal Service prohibits advertising on boxes and says the post must not “represent effigies or caricatures that tend to disparage or ridicule any person”. But why in this time when anything and everything can be used as a platform to spell out one’s convictions, has the mailbox resisted, as though there is some implicit consensus that this would be inappropriate? The closest owners seem to come is with decorative stars and stripes or decals of the American flag. If there is any consistent new image or appendage, it is the security plaque that is affixed to so many boxes today. Without so much as a passing glance to decorative traditions, these square, round or diamond-shaped signs are strictly informational, naming the security company monitoring the residence. Delivering a terse message of electronic surveillance, such plaques are out of synch with the spirit of the box itself.

As security becomes a greater factor in how we assess domestic comfort, it comes as no surprise to see the mailbox reinvented. In recent years in suburban areas, traditional mailboxes have been replaced by brick constructions into which the mailbox is inserted. [Impervious to baseball bats and other forms of garden-variety vandalism,] these postal fortifications also speak to recently developed concerns about mail and identity theft.

For some, brick enclosures are insufficient; more extreme measures are needed. Consider, for example, a mailbox offered by a company called Mail Theft Solutions. Once mailboxes were simply associated with their owners’ names. The Defender, trademarked as the “anti-theft/anti-vandal curb vault”, is one with a name and identity of its own. Costing roughly $800, the 131lb steel box is the Darth Vader of mailboxes, constructed of welded plate-steel that its manufacturers pledge “resists baseball bats, bullets and pipe bombs”. Shaped as a substantial pedestal, the box is equipped with ingoing and outgoing shelves. A secured tray on the floor of the unit catches all the mail placed on the incoming shelf, where it then waits to be retrieved from an access door in the rear that is outfitted with a deadbolt. As one might expect, the Defender catalogues “the facts about identity theft” in its marketing, citing to prospective buyers that it is “the fastest growing crime in America affecting approximately 900,000 new victims each year”.

Then there is the Secure Mail Vault, a white, powder-coated, galvanised steel box with a gracefully curved mail-slot top in the shape of a wave that looks like something designed by architect Frank Gehry but has, in fact, been so configured to prevent a burglar from reaching an arm into the vault. The vault is outfitted with an outer compartment for outgoing mail and an inner compartment to hold incoming mail that can only be accessed by a keypad, with which its owner must validate his or her identity. “Protect you and your loved ones from the dangers that linger in and around your home,” advises the promotional copy. I recall Robert Frost’s bullet-riddled mailbox and wonder whether he would have purchased something like this and which words he might have found for the notion of identity theft.

Perhaps it only makes sense that the electronic age has reshaped the mailbox. Identity theft and mail fraud might be legitimate security concerns. And at a time when information of all kinds comes to us in a steady and constant electronic stream, the daily walk to the mailbox has become an outdated ritual. Yet the image of the mailbox seems to have its own tenacity. In 2004, in an effort to encourage people who lived in remote rural areas to vote using the absentee ballot, Arizona’s Democratic party sent out a flyer picturing a worn mailbox propped up on a pole along a dusty road. Without keypad or lock, the image simply conveyed a comforting familiarity. “Now it’s easier to vote than ever before,” read the copy.

It only makes sense that Mail Boxes Etc still relies on that traditional nomenclature. Established in 1980 for shipping, postal and business services independent of the US Postal Service, 20 years later, the company had more than 4,000 locations and merged with UPS to become the world’s largest franchiser of such services. The company’s stated core values include “caring, honesty, fairness, integrity, trust, respect, commitment, accountability” – a laundry list of traditional community values. As well as the shape of the box and its little red flag, then, even the word “mailbox” seems to have an iconic resonance, exactly because it implies a nostalgia for an era when, despite the occasional threat of bullets and baseball bats, neighbours, passers-by and the mailman were all members of a community that conferred its own brand of security. For all the printed matter that goes in and out of these boxes day after day, their most resonant message might simply be one of implicit trust.

As I drive on the country roads in my county, I can’t help but notice that there is not yet any sign of the Defender or the Secure Mail Vault. One neighbour recently repainted his blue mailbox, and another has hung hers on a trellis and planted it with a vine of clematis. None of these has locks or padlocks or electronic keypads. And I know that somewhere out there, someone is brewing a pot of coffee in expectation of a delivery from FedEx. From time to time, even the sterile aluminium or stainless-steel cluster mailboxes used in residential apartment complexes acquire a pitched roof or fluted support columns, decorative gestures that seem an effort to associate them with their roadside predecessors. And for all their instant messaging, my sons continue to take pleasure in checking the mailbox. This could be because, for the moment at least, it puts our vigilance at bay. A vestige of rural neighbourliness, it offers a different kind of security.

At a time when all manner of communications equipment has been reformed and reinvented, this small container, at once conspicuous and assailable, standing in front of the house, has an undeniable tenacity in continuing to be just as it always has been. Whether a simple green plastic box, a small red barn, an old oil drum, or even buckshot-riddled sheet metal, it is a piece of communications equipment that knows its own vulnerability, that accepts all the frailties implicit in human exchange.

Extracted from ‘The Uncommon Life of Common Objects: Essays on Design and the Everyday’ (Metropolis Books, $27.50)