The Phono-Post online audio-visual archive represents the first systematic attempt to document an important yet surprisingly neglected chapter of media history: the practice of sending individually recorded audio messages on small gramophone records as acoustic letters via the mail. Hundreds of thousands of such “voice-o-grams” were produced throughout Europe, the United States, and much of South America from the early 1930s through the late 1950s, yet until now, they have never been studied nor collected.
The Phono-Post project, generously funded by the Einstein Foundation (Berlin), is directed by Prof. Thomas Y. Levin (Princeton University) and was based from 2010-2014 at the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School for Literary Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. Now relocated to Princeton, the ongoing endeavor is both amassing and making available to scholars a vast archive of these highly fragile, rapidly disappearing and unique multi-media artifacts.
