From the site:
Letters of Note is a blog-based archive of fascinating correspondence, complete with scans and transcripts of the original missives. For a little more background, I suggest reading this interview.
I have a seemingly endless supply of correspondence to plough through, but your input is always welcome. Get in touch via shaun@lettersofnote.com. If you wish to send images, please forward high quality versions where possible, don’t attempt to compress them to the point of illegibility and don’t crop them to death. If you happen to have an original you wish to post to me using regular mail, let me know via email. If you already know it’s fake, don’t send it.
According to Download Squad it is a:
blog with some extraordinary content: historical letters by people like Franz Kafka, Ray Bradbury, Jochen Rindt (the only posthumous Formula One World Champion), and other celebrities.
It’s not all celebrities, though. The letter in the screenshot, for instance, was written by a bank manager from Hiroshima on May 22, 1950, and it’s addressed to an American safe maker. The bank manager praises the quality of the safe, since it survived Little Boy’s atomic blast. Today’s letter is an extremely long diatribe by none other than Franz Kafka.
Each letter comes with an original high-resolution scan, a meticulous transcript (in the original language), and a very readable translation. The transcript includes any and all mistakes in the original – double spaces and all.
What a fascinating archive. These kinds of projects are bringing valuable and wonderful documents to the attention of the whole world instead of tiny numbers of academics who happen to discover them.
A site that deserves to be publicised across the web and while saying that I wonder if there is any web site that is collating links to this kind of niche archiving site ?