HotPotato Report - Letterboxing

It’s been less than a week (~3 days) and I’ve already forgotten where I first heard of this, probably from something related to geocaching somehow? Not sure, but it was a Friday morning and I promptly lost much of the work day, and the entire weekend. - Quest Scouts!! I was looking at adult scout badges, stumbled onto Quest Scouts and one of their tasks involved Letterboxing! That was it!

What is Letterboxing?

Letterboxing is a lower tech, rubber stamp focused predecessor to Geocaching. They both involve finding hidden boxes, but with Letterboxing this is done by following directions (clues) from a starting point given by the person who placed the box (the planter). The clues are called such because they’re rarely as straightforward as GPS coordinates. The clue might be in the form of a story or poem, and will often require some thought and looking at your surroundings or even full on decoding a secret message.

What you find in the box is also a bit different. No swapping of trinkets in a Letterbox. All you’ll find inside is a small book (a logbook) and a stamp, usually (but not always) hand carved. You add the stamp from the box into the book you brought with you with your own ink, and add your signature stamp to the box’s logbook with the date and your ‘Trailname’ (basically an analog username) {Does this term come from trail hiking?}

Both hobbies have a focus on stealth to protect the boxes from being disturbed. I understand the need for this, but it has also likely contributed to their slow decline. I genuinely thought Geocaching was dead before this weekend, but it appears to be going strong, if somewhat down from it’s peak in the late 2010’s. Letterboxing never reached the same heights as Geocaching, but has followed a similar overall trajectory.

Why is it called letterboxing?

When it began in Dartmoor (Europe) in the late(?) 1800’s, finders would often leave postcards and letters in the boxes that the next finder would take with them and mail to whoever left it, making them function as very slow, off the beaten path letterboxes (an old / british term for mailboxes). Looks like this is still done very occasionally (link to lundy letterboxing blog) but it seems to be pretty uncommon in the States.

How do I start?

The great thing about this HotPotato is the low startup costs. I was able to get started almost entirely with things I already had on hand.

Minimal Kit

  • Logbook - preferably bound and unlined, but any paper will do in a pinch. I used a half sheet of copy paper on a clipboard. You can always cut these early stamps out and glue them into a more permanent logbook in the future.
  • Water based inkpad or marker - This is the one thing I had to buy, my inkpads had all dried up and my many alcohol markers were of no use here. I did try watercolor paint on a makeup sponge as a diy ink pad to middling success. It was too messy to take out in the field though. Do NOT use permanent or metalic inks! They will stain the box stamp.
  • A signature stamp - technically optional, your thumbprint is an acceptable alternative. If you have a cute store bought stamp, that’s fine to start with as well. It’s very fun and easy to carve your own DiY stamp from an eraser, and well worth the half hour to rough out something that’s really unique, even if it might not be artistically amazing.
    • I can’t recommend carving your stamp out of linoleum though. Turns out just because it’s good for linocut, doesn’t mean it’s good for stamping. Oh well, I forgot to reverse the lettering anyway.
  • A damp paper towel in a baggie - to clean the remaining ink off the stamps.
  • A free Atlas Quest account - your username here should match your trailname. You can change it in the future, especially in the beginning. It will often be related to your signature stamp (or vice versa), but doesn’t have to be.

Nice to have

  • A hard surface if your logbook isn’t hardback - makes for easier stamping
  • A buddy - treasure hunts are more fun with friends!

Okay but what do I do??

  1. Find a nearby box via Atlas Quest
    1. Recommend finding an area with a few boxes, unfortunately they do get removed / damaged pretty regularly and with fewer participants it’s easier for that to go unnoticed for a while. Having a few to check will give you the best chance of successfully funding at least one.
  2. Gather your supplies
  3. Go to the starting point of the Clue
  4. Follow the Clues
    1. Remember to be subtle, you don’t want to give away the position of the box to non-letterboxers (known as muggles, borrowed from Geocaching) who might mess with it.
    2. Letterboxers are generally pretty big on ’leave no trace’, you might have to shuffle around leaves or move a specified rock, but you shouldn’t need to dig or damage anything to find the ‘box’
  5. If you find the box
    1. Stamp the box’s stamp in your logbook - you can record the box’s info now or from AQ later
    2. Stamp your signature stamp or thumbprint into the box’s logbook. Along with the date, your trail name and your home town if you’re not from the area
    3. Wipe off both stamps (and/or your thumb)
    4. Note: If you find another smaller container inside with another stamp this is a Hitchhiker or a Flea (see Alternate Types of Boxes, below). I’d recommend stamping it into your book and otherwise leaving it be this first time. Also note down the name or number to find it on AQ later, planters love getting updates on these little travelers!
  6. If you don’t find the box
    1. Double check that you’ve followed the clue
    2. Keep in mind it won’t necessarily be an actual box. The first (ok only so far) Letterbox I found was a little pouch made of a ~3in by 4in plastic bag wrapped in black duck tape
  7. When you get home record, your attempt either way.

Beyond the Basics

Planting your own box

After you’ve found a good number of boxes you can try your hand at Planting a new box. Older recommendations were to find 20 or even up to 100 boxes before planting, but with the lower density of boxes these days those higher numbers feel pretty limiting. Do make sure you’ve gotten a sense for good locations for boxes and fun clues.

Components of box

  • A good hiding place -
    • Good general location
      • Publicly accessible & hiding allowed - not airport (security concerns), many parks do not allow, or require permits or permission
      • There seems to be a general philosophy of ‘if they haven’t explicitly forbidden it, it’s probably fine, as long as everyone’s polite’ for geocaching and letterboxing alike.
      • Any place indoors you should absolutely get explicit permission for. Libraries come to mind.
      • Near interesting landmarks / features - can be a great way to show off local landmarks to visitors or encourage locals to checkout a hidden gem. On a trail it might be near a cool tree or view.
    • Hiding Spot
      • Out of the way, but doesn’t require digging or disturbing the env unduly (see leave no trace), note this is more conservative than most geocaching placement rules
      • Think year round - will the brush hiding it be bare sticks in winter? Will the
    • Proximity - will you or someone you designate be able to maintain this box in the future? This isn’t 100% necessary, an abandoned box is still a cool find for the people who get to see it, but an ongoing
  • Durable waterproof container - a small baggie wrapped in duck tape works well on the small side
    • Can check geocaching community for good references here.
    • Avoid re-using food containers for this, especially tasty smelly things like PB, unless you’re very sure you’ve gotten all the scent out. Many animals have better sense of smell than we do and amazing abilities to get into containers hiding those tasty scents.
  • Stamp - hand carved seems to be preferred, followed by other types of custom stamps, with interesting store bought stamps being acceptable but less sought after.
  • Logbook - A small book Not required or recommended:
  • inkpad / markers - very likely to freeze, leak or otherwise be damaged by the elements, and it’s standard for finders to carry their own. If your stamp really requires a specific color for some reason then you can mention it in the clue.

Alternate types of boxes

Note: all of these can also be tracked on AQ!

  • Hitchhikers (HH) - Smaller boxes that hide in other boxes and are moved between them by finders
    • If you find a HH and decide to take it with you, try to get it back into a box within a few weeks.
    • A HH’s logbook should be stamped by every box it inhabits and every boxer who moves it.
    • If you find a HH, but choose not to take it, put the HH’s stamp in your logbook (because you found it), but don’t put your stamp in the HH’s logbook, because you aren’t moving it.
  • Cooties - Mini-boxes that are reverse-pickpocketed onto other letterboxers rather than left in boxes. Sometimes without a logbook to shrink them even further.
  • Fleas - Can act as either a hitchhiker or a cootie
  • Postals - A box which is sent through the mail to others who have signed up to receive it.
    • Micro PLb (Postal Letterbox) - a subset of Postals that fit in a standard envelope and conform to USPS letter standards (<= 1oz, 1/4 in thick). Meeting those restrictions requires thinning down the stamp carving block significantly
    • Postal Ring - each member of a postal ring creates their own box (usually a mirco PLb these days), and all the boxes are sent to each person in the group progressively (in a ring) until each member has an impression from each of the stamps from all the other members and the box returns home to it’s creator.

Letterbox Trading Cards (LTCs)

LTCs are a type of ATC (Artist Trading Cards) which are pretty much exactly what they sound like: little artworks the size of a trading card (2.5"x3.5"). They can be done in any medium, including weirder stuff like fabric, metal, wood and clay. For LTCs the only additional limitation is that it must somehow incorporate a stamped image.

Like ATCs, LTCs can be swapped online or in person. For a swap the artist will generally make a small series of 3-10 (depending on the particular swap’s instructions) similar ATCs/LTCs and send them to the organizer who will redistribute them so that each person retrieves a unique array of cards in the same number they sent in.

With the utter lack of information to dig through on Letterboxing (see The Research below), it’s somewhat melted into an ATC HotPotato too, at least there’s lots of pretty pictures for those.

The Research

This is without a doubt the most frustrating hobby I’ve ever doven in to. I’m not sure if it’s the small size of the community or the timing of it’s peak or the emphasis on not spoiling the stamps for other finders or what, but there is astonishingly few photos of this hobby. If it lasts at all I’ll certainly add a few more articles and photos here to try and help with that but just wow.

As far as I can tell 3 days in, there is one primary site for this hobby: Atlas Quest. It’s predecessor LbNA is still around, though they both now managed by the same web admin. The guy is clearly active and dedicated and doing what he can, but the entire community is riding on his shoulders at this point which seems… not ideal. I’ll certainly be signing up for the very reasonably priced annual membership if this one happens to stick around.

There’s also the issue of the Atlas Quest message boards being almost unusably ancient. I get it, I do. I’m sure those boards are exactly as old as they look and it would be a massive pain in the ass to move them or even just to archive them and start fresh with something new. I have worked on software just as old or older, that also looks it’s age and I was just as appalled when I first saw it. Then again, what I consider the most unusable aspect of these boards - the single stream of messages per board, rather the more forum-style list of threads - is exactly how discord works and that’s super popular right now, so what do I know.