Ancient Web: Jerry Nelson Turned Postage-Rate Frustration Into a 2007 Website

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Jerry Nelson once wanted to put a stamp on a letter and go back inside for coffee. Finding out what the stamp needed to cost was apparently complicated enough to inspire an entire website.

Visit Jerry Nelson's postage-rate charts.

Near the bottom of the very long page, Nelson explains how it began in 2007. The U.S. Postal Service's official tools asked more questions than he wanted to answer. A friendly local post-office webpage in Lafayette, Tennessee, showed just a few common rates, so he decided to make a similar reference of his own.

Then the rates kept changing.

The result is a remarkable hand-maintained collection covering ordinary first-class letters, oversized envelopes, international mail, postcards, small parcels, Priority Mail, Media Mail, money orders, and an assortment of situations ordinary customers encounter only after reaching the counter.

There are columns of prices, old-fashioned horizontal rules, photographs of stamps, complaints about nonmachinable envelopes, and jokes about a customer needing special knowledge just to use the national mail system.

A price chart becomes a policy diary

Nelson's first-class rate history traces the price of a standard letter across generations, from the nineteenth century through recent decades. Other links track precisely when rate changes went into effect.

The homepage contains a running changelog. It records updates in 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019, acknowledges readers who spotted mistakes, and grumbles when official terminology changes again. It documents distinctions between parcels and flats that became more complicated as online discounts and zones proliferated.

Some of the political commentary is the author's own opinion, not a neutral description of postal economics. The central page also now declares that it was being revised in October 2021. Its prominently displayed 58-cent first-class letter rate belongs to that date, not to 2026. Readers must not use these archived figures to calculate postage today.

That datedness is precisely part of the archive's value. The site records not only old prices but what a nonexpert customer had to understand, or failed to understand, during different waves of postal reforms.

An official rate calculator can tell you what to pay now. Nelson's sprawling webpage tells you what a person thought was unnecessarily difficult about the process and how the rules accumulated over time.

Read the author's explanation and linked rate-history tables.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.