The peck is in the mail

VALENTINE’S DAY, with its saccharine Hallmark card sentiments, has nearly extinguished in too many of us any facility for pitching woo via the mail. Not to worry. Babbette Hines’ ‘‘Love Letters, Lost’’ (Princeton Architectural Press), a collection of dozens of vintage love letters harvested from garage sales, swap meets, flea markets, and eBay, and reproduced alongside found snapshots of couples mugging for the camera, offers plenty of sweet inspiration for those who may be rusty in the art of epistolary romance.

A particularly affecting example is an August 1919 letter from Kenton, an oil refining company sales agent in Tulsa, to Patsy in Denver. ‘‘Have I made myself clear,’’ Kenton writes, ‘‘and do you see between the lines that I love you very dearly and more constant from day to day? And it grows on me like—whickies! Every day there’s a new crop—of little loves.’’

Romance, however, is not always a matter of XXXs and OOOs, as Ralph, a hard-boiled L.A. journalist, apparently learned in 1939. ‘‘Not only have you made me lose my literary and social self-control for the first time since I’ve been associating with the opposite sex,’’ he writes in the wee hours of a Friday, ‘‘but you have also given me a terrific headache.’’

Hines, a Los Angeles-based dealer in vernacular photography, started collecting love letters after the 2002 publication of ‘‘Photobooth,’’ a selection of pictures taken in photo booths. ‘‘The way people represent themselves in intimate contexts—like photo booths—is endlessly interesting,’’ she said in a telephone interview. ‘‘The best love letters are written by those who believe—or hope—that the recipient understands them better than anybody else.’’