Category Mail
What Is Mail Art?
Mail art by George Henry Edwards, 1900 Whenever I read that mail art began “in the 1960s,” I roll my eyes. Mail art has been around as long as creative people have been mailing, and wonderful examples from the 19th and 20th century abound, as single items and as books devoted to the genre. [1] […]
The Father of Mail Art
On July 14, 1840, Theodore Hook sent, and received, the first hand-drawn, hand-colored postcard. Mailed to Fulham, in southwest London, with a recently issued Penny Black stamp, the card features caricatures of post office clerks sitting around a giant ink well. It is the first known postcard, and therefore the earliest example of a postcard […]
Accessible
Recently, as I researched mail art created in the 19th and early 20th century, I came across a woodblock print postcard. And I learned that in the early 1900s, paper companies – such as A.H. Abbott in Chicago and Reeves & Sons in London – sold blank postcards especially for watercolor and pen & ink. […]
Found Art
On April 15, 1952, someone had 36 envelopes sealed, stamped and postmarked. In 1981, we bought their house and found a file cabinet in the basement, with the envelopes. As I was dabbling in mail art then, I thought there might be some use for the cancelled stamps; I liked the way they were alike, […]
The Mail Runner
“In all communities which maintain any pretence at civilisation and up-to-date methods, an efficient postal service is an absolute sine qua non.” — Confederate States of America: Government Postage Stamps (1913) by Frederick John Melville Early in 1861, when his home state left the Union, John H. Reagan left the U.S. House of Representatives. Soon […]
Was Hitler a Mail Artist?
Certainly, there are thousands of Adolf Hitler postcards out there, including perhaps the creepiest Christmas postcard ever, but these were commercially produced and clearly do not qualify as mail art. However, during his time in Vienna (1908-1913) the young artist made a meager living by painting watercolors and selling them to tourists. Some histories say […]
Anthony Trollope
I am reading Masters of the Post: The Authorized History of the Royal Mail, a thumping big tome by Duncan Campbell-Smith, and I came across a passage that reminded me of a particular Waterloo of mine. The author noted that Anthony Trollope, who worked for the General Post Office before gaining fame as a novelist, […]
The Blind Reader
I think it’s safe to say that Della Donner and Patti Collins met but once, in December of 1913. Although both lived in Washington D.C., they moved in different circles. Della Newsom Donner “liked to go about a great deal.” Her former husband, William H. Donner, was “a home-loving man” who made $4,000,000 when U.S. […]
An Amiable Uncle
When I began to read, one of the first books my mother gave me was Penrod by Booth Tarkington. I loved the book, in part because Penrod’s boyhood was preferable to my own, but also because Tarkington was fun, funny, and his prose flowed like a brook in the woods. I still return to him […]
The Gdańsk Post Office, 1939
On September 1, 1939, the morning the German army invaded Poland, the postal workers at the Polish post office in Gdańsk delivered more than mail. There was a lot of history behind the 1939 invasion of Poland, and specifically the invasion of Gdańsk. The borders of Poland had been redrawn many times since its birth […]
Faithful Readers 