The Post Office

Thomas Rowlandson

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

England had the world's fastest postal system in the nineteenth century. In 1809 mail coaches averaged eight miles an hour, including five minutes allowed to change horses. This office, housed in a seventeenth-century mansion, handled 170,000 to 200,000 letters weekly, sorting them between 4:30 and 8 pm and delivering them between 6 and 11 the next morning. The recipient paid the delivery man from 4 pence for 15 miles to 1 shilling and 1 pence for 500 miles. In 1840 the British postal system saved itself such complicated bookkeeping by inventing penny stamps for the sender to buy.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art