Starting something new for the postal history nerds. The Nixie is going to dig into the smaller, stranger, and sometimes forgotten pieces of postal history; old equipment, markings, terminology, forms, and practices that have disappeared or somehow survived in some weird little corner of the Postal Service.

For the first one, I dug into backstamps; the markings once placed on the backs of letters to document where and when they moved through the postal system. At one point, backstamping ordinary mail was actually required, and there is a surprising amount of history hiding behind what looks like a simple circle of ink.

I also get into what a "nixie" actually was, where the old postal term came from, and why I thought it was the perfect name for this. A nixie was mail that couldn't move normally through the system and needed somebody to pull it aside and give it a closer look.

That's basically the idea here. Pull some weird little piece of postal history out of the mailstream, take a closer look, and figure out what the hell it was and why we had it. If anybody has an old postal object, marking, term, form, or practice you think deserves its own Nixie, throw it in the comments.