That seems a bit high. You can find individual and collections of 3-4 letters for $2-10 normally. The way I find mine is to search ebay for “love” and then on the left of the screen you can click the category: Collectibles > Postcards & Paper, And then search Ephemera and sometimes “other paper”. See item # 6542483180 for a decent little note which is $.99 right now.

Also search “Letter” in the same catagories. It will give you alot more finds, but many will be boreing and you’ll have to dig more.

I agree with both sides of what you have said, but end up falling on the side of collecting, preserving and sharing. The strongest argument I have for collecting is the assumption that one would burn their letters if they wanted to protect them after death. I also get to thinking about the fleeting nature of and individual.

After we die we leave little legacy as a common person. Maybe we have some descendants who cherish our memory, but realistically this is not likely to last for too many years. So we leave behind a few material things. Most are sold off as soon as we die, but maybe a few keepsakes and mementos are kept by our immediate family. But really how many of these keepsakes intrinsically contain any ghost of the beauty of one’s life? Then, once our children or closest pass on who will keep our legacy? Who will remember the beauty of the individual?

It comes down to one preserving one’s life through words. No other thing—not even photographs—will ever be able to be past on which will contain any of the color and life one has lived. And in words, what could be more emblematic of the beauty of life than the words of love?

Then there is the idea of what these love letters might mean for society. They record the history of an era as much as they record the legacy of a couple. From them we can gaze into worlds gone. We can see the history of a time not from the perspective of a history book, or the legend of a bloody battlefield, but from a human and soft perspective of a common individual—an individual in love.

We don’t think much of buying a famous person’s journals, letters, or biography drawn from the same journals. Have you ever heard of someone not buying a book of Thomas Jefferson’s papers because of a privacy issue? Or could it be argued that suppressing its publication would be a detriment to society and history? Somehow though, because it’s an original letter by an unknown person we feel more voyeuristic reading it.

So, I feel it is an assumed notion that if you keep your love letters and leave no instructions for their disposal than you are leaving them to be shared. Interestingly, I understand that the late Pope John Paul left instructions in his will for all of his personal notes and papers to be burned upon death. I know people who have a since of loss about this.

Really I hope I am honoring someone’s ghost by savoring the writing of love the have left. I hope they are proud to have left a tiny flower of beauty to live on.