For as long as we could write and find supplies with which to do it, people have been sending love letters. The Japanese perfected the eloquence of tonka and the pillow book. Vermeer captured for all eternity the flush on a recipient maiden’s cheek. And for floral facility with language, few could beat the Victorians.

In 1882, Thomas Hill advised those in need of guidance on the correctly written love letter thusly:

Letters of Love
Of all letters, the love-letter should be the most carefully prepared. Among the written missives, they are the most thoroughly read and re-read, the longest preserved, and the most likely to be regretted in after life.
 
Importance of Care
They should be written with the utmost regard for perfection. An ungrammatical expression, or word improperly spelled, may seriously interfere with the writer’s prospects, by being turned to ridicule. For any person, however, to make sport of a respectful, confidential letter, because of some error in the writing, is in the highest degree unladylike and ungentlemanly. 
 
Necessity of Caution
As a rule, the love-letter should be very guardedly written. Ladies, especially, should be very careful to maintain their dignity when writing them. When, possibly, in after time the feelings entirely change, you will regret that you wrote the letter at all. If the love remains unchanged, no harm will certainly be done, if you wrote with judgement and care. 
 
At What Age To Write Love-Letters
The love-letter is the prelude to marriage – a state that, if the husband and wife be fitted for each other, is the most natural and serenely happy; a state, however, that none should enter upon, until, in judgement and physical development, both parties have completely matured. Many a life has been wrecked by a blind, impulsive marriage, simply resulting from a youthful passion. As a physiological law, man should be twenty-five, and woman twenty-three, before marrying.

A more 21st-century approach to the art of letter writing of all kinds is available in Samara O’Shea’s For the Love of Letters.

Still, anyone with a pen and a clue how much postage it takes to actually mail something these days can send a regular love letter. With so many options at your disposal, wouldn’t you prefer to be a bit more creative and get your Cyrano on with flair?

There is no better way to tell your beloved how madly in love you are than Mad Libs. For this purpose, Roger Price and Leonard Stern have given us Mad Libs in Love, complete with instructions on “How to Write a Love Letter.” A bit more versatile is their series of Adult Mad Libs, which, provided sufficient mood-altering stimulants are available, are capable of supplying an entire evening’s worth of cocktail party entertainment. Rather less tame than the Mad Libs we loved as children, these volumes cover a range of social topics from Who Moved My Cubicle to Advice to the Lovelorn. In a few short minutes, assuming the object of your affection is grammatically correct, your very own Mad Lib love letter could look something this this:

If short and sweet is more your style, then Valentine’s Day cookies from Flour Bakery are the perfect way to declare your devotion – or lack thereof should that be the sentiment you need to convey. Available in all three Flour locations (South End, Fort Point and Cambridge), you’ll have to ask for certain versions, as they are kept behind the counter. Whether the cookies you choose induce love, libido or a libel suit, you can be sure they’ll come to a satisfying conclusion. (The cookies are yummy.)

For those of you who tend to prefer your declarations of love to be writ large, skywriting is the method for you. This does require a certain brevity unless you are prepared to spend a fortune in jet fuel. In that case, you might as well buy a diamond and be done with it.

Seriously though – and I beg you to trust me on this – as methods for declaring ardor, emails and texting are just tacky. Put away the keyboard for a day. The object of your affection will be much more inclined to show you some affection in return.