A week is the limit, and the corner date is the proof

A dozen letters, fanned just enough to show every top-right corner.

On each one, in the same red hand: 4.ii, 11.ii, 18.ii, 25.ii — a week apart, all the way down the stack.

The paper changes. Thin airmail, heavy cream, a torn flap. The interval between the dates does not.

Why does every letter get answered inside a week?

Because a letter left longer than that stops being a letter and starts being a debt.

The reply itself might take ten minutes to write. What grows is the waiting, not the task — a letter left unopened on a table for a fortnight says something about the relationship whether or not that's intended, and the sender starts wondering long before the reply arrives. A week is short enough that the wondering never gets going. He isn't fast because he's tidy. He's fast because he worked out, long ago, which side of a letter takes longer to write off.

Why write the date on the letter rather than just answering it?

Because a reply he remembers sending is not the same fact as a reply he can prove he sent, and the second kind is the only one that keeps a system like this running.

Memory is exactly what a system with a dozen correspondents can't rely on — a dozen different weeks, no reliable way to hold all of them in his head at once. The date on the corner turns "I answered that" into a fact sitting on the letter itself, checkable at a glance, in the same hand every time. Receipts filed the moment money changes hands work on the identical principle — proof written down at the point of the event outlasts anyone's memory of the event.

What happens to a letter that goes past the week?

Nothing happens to it, because in this system nothing does — that's the entire point of setting the interval as tight as it is.

A looser rule — answer within the month, answer when there's time — sounds more relaxed and produces exactly the pile everyone recognises: a few unopened, one half-read, one that's been meant to be next for weeks. A tight interval doesn't feel urgent in the moment; it just means the backlog never gets the chance to start. The reciprocity list works the same way — a favour logged at the point it happens costs almost nothing, and the same favour recalled vaguely months later costs a great deal more to settle.

Whose permission do you need to print somebody's own letters?

His — they're his replies and his handwriting, and the real question is whether he'd want the habit shown rather than just kept.

Nobody else has a claim on a date written in the corner of a letter he wrote. The senders' names and the contents of what they wrote are a different matter, and stay off the shirt entirely — what's printed here is the system he runs, not anyone else's private correspondence.

Does this still work now that most people don't send letters?

Yes, because the letter is only the format the habit happened to be built in — the underlying rule, answer fast so nothing has time to become a debt, doesn't care what carries the message.

A phone call has its own fixed shape at the moment it ends, worked out the same way, by repetition rather than by design. The medium changes. The refusal to let a reply go stale doesn't. The correspondents who still write to him get the same week they always got, and the red date proves it every time.

Does it print well?

Yes — a fanned stack of pale letters is mostly clean flat shapes with one strong repeating accent, which is exactly what a screen print wants.

Two inks carry it: a warm cream or faded red for the paper and the folded edges, and the same red, a shade brighter, for the dates alone, so the eye finds the run of them first. Keep the handwriting rough at the edges rather than set in a typeface — evenness there would read as a printed label, not a habit kept up by hand for years.

How do I get one made?

Describe the correspondence at JustOG — what the letters are, whose hand is on them, and what mark tells you it's been dealt with. Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to order and shipped.

Designs other people have published are in the shop.

The thirteenth letter is already on the table, not yet a week old.