by Irving Fang and Ann Norris
ISBN: 1-933-01172-6
Cost: $15.00
For most of history, if you wanted to send a letter, horses helped you. Teenagers and young men who rode for the Pony Express were the most famous of all the letter carriers. They risked their lives every day. Their job was so dangerous that a newspaper advertisement for Pony Express riders said:
Orphans preferred
The Pony Express that crossed the West was not the world’s first pony express. Ancient kings of China and Persia had their own.
A king wrote a letter on the shaved head of a slave, then waited until his hair grew back befor dispatching him. Another king killed slaves who brought him bad news. Marathon races honor a messenger who delivered his one word report, “Nike!” then fell dead.
From the sending of pigeons to the battle over using postage stamps to the experiment of sending letters by a missile fired from a submarine, the story of how the mail was carried fascinates us.
Mail is the third of the 11-volume series, The Story of Communication. It begins at the dawn of recorded history and takes us to modern postal services.
