Book Discussion: Letters in Books with Places and Postal Codes

 

In this post, I said how I used fake zip code in a letter. This got me to thinking about books that have used letters with zip codes or postal codes (from other countries). 

One thing this brought to mind the Shopaholic series, where the MC receives letters from banks and credit card companies. The author is British, so the banks are in cities such as London and Liverpool, and the story itself is in London. Click to see one of the letters in one of the books. I looked up the address in the letter to see if the street was a real one. No results for Camel Square in Liverpool showed up. I also looked up the postal code used in the letter to see if it exists (the results produced no such evidence). Also, I could not find a PGNI First Bank in Liverpool or Endwich Bank in London (used in another letter from the same book). 

Also in the post on Monday, I referenced The Best of Enemies, one of the books I got a Kmart before they closed in my town and which I read during the pandemic shutdown. I still have my copy. The prologue in this book is a series of invitations fr celebrations and letters from the hotel where the celebrations take place (with the cost of damages). I had already looked up the zip code used in the hotel letters and saw that is it an actual zip code in Chicago. Another of the letters is from a branch of the same hotel in Las Vegas, with a real zip code from that city. But when I looked up Hotel Wintercourt, no results for such a hotel turned up.

I also noticed that no handwritten signatures appear in these letters. I wondered how to do this when I did my letter. But when I saw these examples, I decided to keep mine as is, and not try to create a fake signature and try to insert it into my WIP. And although these examples use real zip codes and cities, I plan to keep the fake ones in my work. 

These are the only examples of such letters I can come up with right now. And these are letters from businesses, rather than personal letters, which have often been used in books. The letters in the Shopaholic series are interspersed throughout the books. I specifically looked for business letters since this is what I have in my WIP.  Not only are the city and zip code fictional, but so is the name of the business, a hospital and the street on which it is located.

What are some other books that have letters like this in them? What is your take on using real vs. fake dresses, codes, and cities in books?