Wait a minute, Mr. Postman
It’s Time for the February CYBILS Scribbles!
Did you know that the U.S. Postal Services’ Literary Arts Series in 1979 was established to allow mail-sending Americans to celebrate all things book and literature related? Because of them, we’ve seen notable literary figures like Ogden Nash, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Ursula K. LeGuin’s faces on postage stamps, and nerded out hard over the Dr. Seuss stamps in 2004, the whole ‘Children’s Favorites’ set in 2006 that featured Where the Wild Things Are, Charlotte’s Web and The Very Hungry Caterpillar, which prompted the Royal Mail in the UK to issue postage stamps that year featuring Maisy and the caterpillar, too. Ezra Jack Keats’s classic and gorgeous The Snowy Day stamps debuted in 2017 and we’re still not over the strikingly gorgeous Good Night Moon stamps from 2025. This year’s Literary Arts Series pick is for their Black Heritage series, coming out just in time for Black History Month and celebrating Phyllis Wheatley, a young enslaved woman who lived in Boston in the 1700’s. Raise a pen to this power scribbler, who didn’t let slavery slow her roll, and who published more than sixty poems throughout her life, thirty-nine of them in her first book. Like many other women of her time, she was also a prodigious letter writer - so if you’ve got a minute, why not send a letter or postcard this winter? It’s an excuse to spread a little happy, and you can’t say you don’t have a ton of cool stamps to choose from!
Signed, Sealed, Delivered: An Epistolary Book List
Black History Month has been around a minute. Did you know the idea of it kicked off in 1915? At the fiftieth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, sponsored by the state of Illinois, a man named Carter G. Woodson saw the literal thousands of African Americans (reports counted between six and twelve thousand) waiting in line to see the history exhibit on African American life and progress that the state had put together. Seeing so many of his fellow African Americans interested and eager to learn. Mr. Woodson realized that there was a great need for African Americans to remember where they had come from, and be encouraged by where they were going. Celebrating the struggles and achievement of a people who, only fifty years previously, hadn’t had a voice or a starring role in the growing American story suddenly became crucial to him. Working together with members of his fraternity and alma mater at the University of Chicago, Mr. Woodson chose the month of February to honor two men whose lives made a big impact on the history of African Americans, Mr. Abraham Lincoln and Mr. Frederick Douglass whose birthdays fall on the 12th and the 14th of the month respectively. Though it wasn’t until after much work and many decades later that Black History Month would be recognized by President Gerald Ford in 1976, it’s clear that Black History has always been a part of global history, and American history - so obviously we had to put together a list of recently published books by and about African Americans which we’ve either got on our TBR list, or have recently enjoyed. We hope you enjoy it too - and just like Mr. Woodson intended, we hope that you learn a little something to celebrate, too.
Scribble 😏 Smiles
Would you like to name a baby elephant? Of course you would.
For such a short period of competition, the Olympics certainly holds a massive amount of the world’s attention. From Canadian curling memes to dogs on the speed skiing track to breaking gold medals (!), we’ve been amused and bemused, and we’re still beaming about the historic first Olympic crosscountry skier - from Haiti. Yay, Haiti!
Are you already over the whole Wuthering Heights thing, or are you longing for another intense, moody, period film? You can always stream the 2011 version of Jane Eyre, 2005’s lushly beautiful Memoirs of a Geisha, or the 1997 classic, Titanic for more painful, tragic love stories to round out your viewing month. Or, just to change it up, try the 2003 film, I Capture the Castle, Ever After from 1998 with Drew Barrymore, or Ella Enchanted from 2004 are other book-based films that have that fully immersive period-piece vibe that will whisk you away. Enjoy!
It’s hard to believe that March is *this* close, and that the Vernal Equinox, the official calendar end of winter, is juuuust around the corner. Even if your blanket-and-sweater situation doesn’t tell you that could possibly be true, even now, beneath the dense, chilly, and wet soil, there’s a slow heartbeat accelerating. Though the shift seems incremental, it’s already clear that things won’t stay the way they are - not without a fight. Changing is coming, friends; the signs are showing everywhere. Meanwhile, as you navigate these last frigid days of winter, we wish you good blankets, better friends, and the very best of books! 📖