Before the age of instant communication, every written word carried weight. Letters were deliberate, speeches carefully crafted, and each sentence intentionally chosen. These documents reveal the human experiences—hopes, fears, loves, and dreams of those who came before us.
Letters offer an intimate window into the minds of great thinkers, writers, and historical figures. Unlike their published works, letters reveal the personal thoughts, daily struggles, and human connections that shaped history.
These historical letters, speeches, and essays are frozen moments that can awaken human capabilities. Many documents remain neglected, waiting for rediscovery. I treat these materials as works of art, windows into the soul, and bridges across time.
I'm Bhuvan, and I'm pursuing a larger initiative cataloging Indian public domain works. On the main Paper Lanterns site, I curate individual letters and documents with rich historical context.
This collections site serves a different purpose: I clean up historic letter collections in their entirety, fixing OCR errors and doing manual quality checks to preserve complete correspondences. This work is done almost entirely manually, one letter at a time, using AI tools to assist with formatting and verification but without specialized technical infrastructure.
This is truly a labor of love. If you're an expert in OCR techniques or historical document preservation and would like to help improve this process, I'd be grateful for your guidance. You can reach me on Twitter or LinkedIn.
Inspired by Letters of Note by Shaun Usher, I'm collecting documents carefully verified for authenticity and historical accuracy. I believe these materials contain timeless wisdom and beauty that should be accessible to everyone.
This project is part of my larger work with Dhwani.ink, where I'm building a curated directory of Indian literary and historical works in the public domain. Dhwani—a Kannada word meaning "voice" or "sound"—represents these works as voices from history, echoing across time.
While Dhwani aggregates links to thousands of public domain works from repositories like Archive.org, Project Gutenberg, and Wikisource, PaperLanterns focuses on the intimate art of correspondence. Together, they address what I see as a profound cultural apathy toward preserving our literary heritage.
As I wrote on Dhwani: "This is our history. And if we don't preserve our past, the future will be nothing but a shitty remake of it." These letter collections are one way I'm working to ensure these voices—these windows into the minds of great thinkers—remain accessible to future generations.
My primary sources include Archive.org, Wikisource, Project Gutenberg, and university special collections. I carefully verify that all materials are free from copyright restrictions before publication.
Each collection includes source citations linking back to the original archive, ensuring transparency and enabling further research.