The Dead Letters Mail Club

Become a recipient of the Dead Letters archive and receive authentic, handmade physical storytelling inspired by immersive theatre and world building.

Each delivery contains a personal letter from another time, alongside carefully crafted ephemera, designed by professional world builder Thomas Kirk Shannon (yes, it's a job!). Photographs, tickets, notes, and worn paper fragments - designed to feel genuinely carried through history. Through fold marks, fading ink, annotations, and texture, every object becomes part of the narrative: a tactile glimpse into a life lived decades, and sometimes centuries ago.

The Mail Club >

Not grand historical artefacts — but the smaller things people once kept in coat pockets, folded into books, or forgotten inside drawers.

Current Subscriptions Available

Story telling through graphic prop making

The paper fragments inside are just as important as the writing itself.

Dead Letters has a focus on ephemera - the disposable pieces of graphic design most people throw away without thinking. Tram tickets. Flyers. Receipts. Calling cards. Newspaper cuttings. Menus. Cigarette packets. Scribbled notes. Small objects never intended to survive.

These fragments quietly reveal how people lived:

  • what typography looked like
  • what cafés they visited
  • what brands existed
  • what they could afford
  • where they travelled
  • what they kept in their pockets

What was once disposable becomes beautiful.

Each item is designed and produced as a miniature historical artefact - researched, printed, aged, and assembled by hand.

Thomas Kirk Shannon

BUILT BY A WORLD BUILDER

I’m Thomas Kirk Shannon, a set designer and world builder working across immersive theatre and storytelling.

My practice sits between history, design, and fiction. Building worlds through objects, spaces, and the quiet details that make something feel lived in. I’m interested in how stories are carried through physical things.

I use the tools I've gained through my career in immersive theatre and graphic design to create ephemera and environments that suggest real histories, even when they are entirely fictional. What matters to me is not spectacle, but belief - the small, almost invisible decisions that make a world feel like it continues beyond what you’re shown.

Dead Letters is an extension of this practice: a way of telling stories through mail, paper, and fragments of imagined lives.

The Mail Club >