Geographical Philatelists Are Vicious

My original post on some stamps I found, from the Republic of South Moluccas, has received some negative press! (If one snotty know-it-all and one offensive L2 learner over the course of three years is "negative press.")

You can read about the drama here, on my other blog, Sweven Volant. Why'd I update this story there and not here? Well, I wrote the original post in 2009 so updating that entry would guarantee no one would ever see it. This way, I can share the love between that blog and this one (and I haven't had anything really startling to post in that other blog).

It's not necessary to read either of these posts to fully enjoy one's life experience. This is just a funny thing that happened. Not uproariously funny, but... funny enough.

UPS is Bad For Postage

Quick announcement: Do not use UPS for international postcards.


U.S. postage rates went up not too long ago, so an oversized postcard needs $1.05 to go overseas.

I thought I'd save myself a bus trip and walk down to the local UPS outlet for stamps, much closer than any of the three post offices in my area. They carry first class Forever stamps, but they don't have them for international rate. However, the clerk offered to run them through their postage processor and I didn't know what the difference was.

The difference is, UPS marks this service up 86¢! What should have been $13.65 for 13 postcards came out eleven dollars more! I'm embarrassed by my poor judgment, but I went through with the transaction to teach myself a lesson. My wife may be upset with me for this needless expenditure, but I'll deserve her resentment, and hopefully this negative association will keep me away from UPS in the future.

I hope you'll learn from my lesson: you can buy Forever stamps at UPS, but for any other mail they are a terrible idea.

Colbert's Ironic Commemoration

Image: blog.zazzle.com

There was no way I could let this slide by. In actuality, I'm embarrassed that I haven't posted about it earlier: that's the level of my procrastination.

What you see is what it is: Stephen Colbert has designed (as anyone can, and as I have in the past) his own First Class rate stamp through Zazzle.com. The image is of his gleeful farewell to the U.S. Postal System via smartphone. (For the record, I'm an avid fan of Colbert.)

This is in reference to my prior post, about the struggling economics supporting the USPS. Reports I read in the news are conflicting: some suggest that the USPS will shut down for the winter, relegating all postal freight to private companies like UPS or FedEx; others, in line with the articles the Missive Maven cited, predict more moderate outcomes, such as losing Saturdays in the delivery cycle.

Either way, if you're thinking about shopping for postage, Colbert's levity provides yet another alternative. I just sent out a large batch of square postcards going out to global destinations. That's 98¢ plus a fee for using a square postcard--because there's no clear up or down on it, it has to be hand-processed. This fee used to be 13¢ but recently I sent some out and it seems the additional rate has gone up to 20¢. I was unable to confirm this on the USPS' website, indeed, I couldn't find any chart delineating the rates of variously sized postcards. I really need to buy one of those handy graphed mats the postal workers use, or else photograph one and design my own. In fact, that will be my next project, and when I come up with a definitive answer you know I'll post it here. Eventually.

I mean, sending postcards is tricky business. Did you know the stamps can go anywhere on the address side, but the USPS will process the lowest-appearing address (be careful when supplying your return address)? And you've got to leave four inches clear to the left of the stamps (in the upper right corner) to make room for the postmark. Postcards can be pretty tricky.

The Riddle of International Postage

Sorry I haven't updated in so long. To my dismay, I haven't actually done a lot of letter- or postcard-writing in the past two months! Postage is kind of expensive in Indonesia though postcards are cheap. Unfortunately, it seems like one company has a stranglehold on postcards throughout the Indonesian islands so they aren't very interesting--ubiquitously, they are the "image on white background" style, like a negative motivational poster, with the caption beneath. Also, they never seem to really reflect the street-level life of Bali or elsewhere, focusing instead on terraced farming lands or ancient temples. It's up to blogging to show my friends what life's really like here.

Also: I cannot figure out the Indonesian postal system. Seriously, what the hell? I went to a post office proper in Denpasar and got stamps for some postcards. Without question or options, I paid Rp. 25,000 (US$2.78) for postcard postage going to the US.

When I bought stamps on Gili Trawangan, a small island off of Lombok, the convenience store tacked an extra Rp. 1,000 per stamp, but they also insisted I needed less postage. When I had questions that bumped against our language barrier, they referred me to a bookstore that also dealt with all postal issues. They had a sign posted that explained the rates: Rp. 25,000 gets it there in two weeks, but Rp. 7,500 (US$0.83) takes a month at least to travel. Even with the convenience store's "convenience" fee, it's still less than half the previous rate.

And then I sent a bunch out from the Sukarno-Hatta Airport in Jakarta, Java. The convenience store from which I bought the stamps again insisted I needed even less postage--Rp. 5,000--but also tacked on a 100% fee for each stamp! So what is the legal rate? I have no idea, but if you're in Indonesia, I strongly urge you to deal with a proper post office rather than any other service.

On the other hand, now I'm in Bangkok, Thailand. I wrote up a bunch of old postcards from Bali and Gili Trawangan and went out to a local mall, where there was a Mail Boxes Etc. office. Size doesn't seem to matter with postcard postage like it does in the States. There was only a moment of confusion when a clerk was inexperienced with sending mail out to the US, so she deferred to another employee, but otherwise it was simplicity itself: I walked up, handed them my missives, they calculated the postage and I paid it, around US$5 for four postcards and one letter going out to the US and other countries. Awesome.

I never actually used this Bangkok mailbox, I'm just including it because I take pictures of mailboxes in other countries. I thought it interesting that the front of it differentiates between "Bangkok" and "Other Places." Tells you something about the mindset of a city, like how California and New York like to dismiss everything between them as "flyover states."

Sealed With A Kissinger

Anna Chapman: part Mata Hari, part Tori Amos.
Image: The Guardian.

You know what's dead fascinating to me right now? This whole Russian spy ring that's recently emerged in the news. The FBI announced the bust of ten spies in "deep cover," after intercepting a surprisingly blatant and guileless missive from Moscow.

The Kremlin, of course, denied any such spies were in place and suggested this was a fabrication by the FBI to compromise the largely positive relations President Obama had recently been cultivating with Russia's third president, Mr. Medvedev.

And then the spies started confessing (those who hadn't fled). Their real names have been released to the public. Our two nations have organized and completed an honest-to-goodness spy swap. Very far from a ruse, this tableau feels more like a contrived Cold War plotline taken far too seriously by some department head not overly endowed with imagination or, no pun intended, intelligence.

But you know what this means for us postalaters? Do you know what relevance this bears to us, men and women of letters?

A new draft of postage stamps! It seems that Russia views quite positively any of her spies that have secreted any information out of the United States, and it is not at all uncommon to commemorate them on their postage stamps. I don't know how I feel about the ethics of honoring the qualities of deceit and manipulation, venerating underhandedness and duplicity... but I do know I'd be particularly excited to receive a letter or postcard with a Russian spy on it. I had no idea this was a practice at all, and how fascinating to know it's out there. There's always the potential that someone over there might send me a postcard with one such cultural luminary featured on it, thanks to Postcrossing.

Decisions, Decisions

Oh, the dilemma: two dashing suitors vying for her attention, each a world of pleasure and thrills in his own right, yet so diametrically opposed... and there was only room in her life for one.

Elegant and irresistibly demure, Audrey truly had the luxury of selecting any man she chose from a broad and teeming pool of options. Not wishing to crush any hearts, yet knowing she had to look out for her own best interests, she nevertheless whittled the roster down to the two most appealing candidates.

Cary, oh, Cary! Those eyes, that voice, the subtly amused smile that played about the corners of his lips while the rest of his expression gave away nothing... Cary! He melted her over cappuccino in that tiny bistro on Calle Larga San Marco, so near the action yet easily overlooked unless one were thoroughly familiar with Venice. It was his worldliness that won her over, this cosmopolite with the seductive purr who, admittedly, was old enough to be one of her father's younger friends.

And his spectral opposite, James: brash, unpolished, heady with restlessness and aimlessness. He almost put her off with his diffidence--after all, she knew her worth and was accustomed to being treated with an amount of deference. But the fact that he wasn't entirely available to her somehow enticed her, and it was on their symbolic trip from Independence (Missouri) to Junction City (Kansas) on a '41 Indian Chief that she started to fall for this unruly boy. It was one thing to have the world handed to you on a platter but quite another thing to have a small bundle of the Unknown dangled just out of reach. Especially when the Unknown hid behind lips like James'.

What was a girl to do?

The Office Outfit

Can you imagine owning your own "office outfit?" I'm not talking about a nice tweed suit with Oxfords and a tasteful silk tie. I'm talking about this little thing: brown cardboard box and electric blue lid containing an entire set of stamps for making your own customizable rubber stamp. Multiples of each letter, upper and lower case, stored in a nice wooden rack, waiting to be arrayed in a wide, thin handle for printing.

What would you use it for? When would you use this thing instead of a typewriter? When would it be more economical to assemble your own line or two of typeset rather than contacting a professional printer?

I suppose it would be handy to confirm receipt of certain documents, though it doesn't strike me as the pinnacle of convenience to throw "Received by" into a rack and stamp it out for a few pages, then replace all the letters--and I'd put them back in alphabetical order, though some people would just put them back into storage and call it done.

It would also be handy for printing on unconventional surfaces, like, a label on a bottle or anything else that couldn't easily be fed into a typewriter. It could be handier to print on a porous surface rather than feed a sheet of labels into a typewriter or something, I suppose.

This was an artifact of my grandparents', when I went to visit grandpa's house in Idaho (grandma has been deceased for several years). In my last trip two years ago, it was very important for me to go through their office supplies and see what were the accoutrement of their day, what they found necessary or handy to have around. My grandmother was a high school teacher and my grandfather dealt in real estate, and they must've done some considerable business at home, based on two rooms that have been sequestered for an office and storage for office supplies.

A Blast of Stamps From the Past

Oh, my Postalators! I have to tell you something I'm very excited about, though the circumstances around it are unfortunate.

My wife and her sisters find themselves in the position of needing to clean out their childhood home (Green Bay, WI) and prep it for sale: their parents now live in Minneapolis due to certain medical conditions. They love being closer to their family--everyone else lives in or around Minneapolis--but they are faced with the daunting task of cleaning out the house and keeping it maintained while trying to move it in this profoundly lugubrious housing market.

This weekend Rebecca made a second trip out to Green Bay with her sisters and they dove into picking through their old property, salvaging clothes and artifacts from their teenage years, going through furniture and household supplies, all that stuff. But my wife, my beautiful and clever wife, look what she's come back with.

After each of her two trips, she returned with entire sheets of brand-new (or at least unused) stamps from the previous decade--some of these stamps are 20 years old! Some of these stamps could drink, vote, go into the military, and do stuff with girls. I even remember buying some of these postage stamps (the Classic Comics in particular) when I used to more heavily correspond through the postal venue with friends around the nation. I used to look for interesting stamps and they were easily had, and now I've got them all over again.

They're in smaller denominations, of course, First Class isn't what it used to be. But they still work: one American Illustrators (34¢), one Big Band Leaders (32¢) and one James Dean (32¢) will carry a birthday card to Oisa, Japan, regardless of chronology. What a gift! Rebecca was so excited to turn these over to me, knowing quite accurately how thrilled I'd be with their discovery.

Consequently, the new correspondents I connect with over Postcrossing are going to receive a very interesting selection of stamps unlikely to come from any other source. Heads up, Finland! Keep your eyes peeled, Ukraine! Puerto Rico, I'm talkin' to you! I'd even like to extend the invitation to anyone reading this. E-mail me your street address (put "Old Stamps" in the subject header so I can filter for spam) and I'll send you a postcard or even a short note with these vintage stamps. One way or another, I expect they will go very quickly.

(The only exception is the Mars Pathfinder stamp: that will be preserved and prized, never placed on an envelope and sent away.)

Troubles with Postal Calculation

Ugh, sorry about not posting anything in here for a week and a half. I haven't been terribly active, postally.

I wanted to tune in briefly to warn people away from using the postage stamp calculator I had formerly linked to. It's shite. It sounds like a good idea but it's shite. Here's the sitch: I'm sending a square postcard to Russia, and that entails one 98¢ stamp (int't rate) plus 13¢ (square card = manual processing), so, $1.11 in total. (Note: the post office does not print 13¢ stamps.)

I have stamps in these denominations: 10¢, 28¢, 37¢, 42¢, and 44¢. I entered all these into the postage calculator, and it's supposed to find the minimum number of stamps in combination to satisfy the postage requirements. It suggested two 44¢ stamps and three 10¢ stamps, coming to $1.18.

Except I put two 37¢ stamps on by accident, then realized that a 10¢ stamp and a 28¢ stamp would come to $1.12--only one cent over! The postage calculator would have made me waste six more cents beyond that. And you might scoff at the difference of six cents, but why would you spend any money you didn't have to?

So don't bother with that postage stamp calculator. Actually, it's probably better for my mind (in terms of Alzheimer's prevention) to just figure out my own postage solutions. It could be a riddle, and I like riddles.

Scanning the Stamp Collection

I've got a free evening to myself, so what do I do?

1) Get drunk and watch Jackie Chan movies.
2) Go out with friends to a local bar I've always been curious about.
3) Take a long bath and read in bed.
4) None of the above.

That's right: I went through the stack of postcards I've accrued from a year with Postcrossing and scanned in a couple dozen stamps. I'm very prompt about scanning the fronts of the postcards in, yes, but for some reason I let the stamps accumulate over great periods of time.

Well, tonight Rebecca was off at her book club so I sealed myself in the office, played They Might Be Giants at a modest volume, arranged a dozen postcards on my flatbed scanner, and carefully picked apart and cropped the stamps in Picasa's very handy photo editor. And it's not enough for me to crop and retouch the stamps, but once they're in my online album, Philately, I label each one by its country of origin, type in some appropriate tags, and then affix each stamp to its respective location on the globe.

That's right: through the magic of Google Maps, I get a special little thrill in seeing the thumbnails of these stamps floating over the Earth itself! I enjoy seeing how widespread my little collection is, and I'm curious about the nations I've never heard from. For instance, I have a dozen postage stamps from Finland and Germany each, but out of all of Africa I only have five stamps in South Africa. I even have three stamps from the South Moluccas, which isn't a nation and never legally produced postage stamps, and yet I don't have one single stamp from Norway, Iran, or Argentina, among many other nations.

Okay, I guess I don't expect to collect stamps from Iran or North Korea, but still. You can still see the other stamps I've got now.

Overtly Complete

Further proof that everything you can think of is already old news on the Internet: the Postage Stamp Calculator.

I'm in a postcard exchange network, Postcrossing, and so I'm sending postcards out to all nations of the world. Currently my sending limit is up to nine cards out there at once--everyone starts with a limit of five cards and you prove your devotion over time. Sometimes I have the appropriate postage and sometimes I've got a random assortment of stamps.

And sometimes I want to send a nice postcard that happens to be square. Square letters and postcards incur an additional 13¢ because they have to be hand-cancelled. Postal processing machines can't right the card/envelope into an appropriate position if it's not rectangular, so the post office has to tack on a little fee for the manual processing, yet the post office does not sell 13¢ stamps.

Enter the postage calculator. Type in all the denominations of postage stamps you have, type in your required postage, and it easily figures out how many of which stamps you need to meet the postage requirements. Sometimes you'll go over the amount, sure, but it's usually by only a few cents and it's still easier than driving to the nearest post office and buying the exact amount of stamps.

Or maybe it's not. If it's not, you should definitely patronize your local post office. If it's an inconvenience (like for me, between the holiday crowds and all the streets being coated in glare ice), go ahead and use up some of the extra stamps you have lying around.

Q: Is it easier to type in all the denominations of postage you have or to do the simple math and figure it out for yourself?

A: Go away.

Giant Robot Postage in Space

This is pretty awesome: a complete sheet of GUNDAM stamps.

It doesn't matter who you are or what you're into. Maybe you like big giant robots in space, maybe you don't. Maybe you've heard of anime, maybe you haven't. Maybe you like Japan, maybe you don't. But you have to admit that a complete sheet of postage stamps featuring one of the most important anime titles to transform and define an entire genre is pretty awesome.

Do we agree? Can you give me that much?

Come on! Look at this! How important does an anime have to be to garner the office of postage stamps? That's significant! Yes, many other nations have plants and weeds and small animals on their stamps, but at least they're indigenous to their region. All you have to do is reframe your concept of "region" and you can move within any number of contexts! In the region of Japanese television, in the region of hand-drawn, career-seiyuu animation, in the region of epic storytelling, you have got to respect this. You have got to give GUNDAM its due.

If you can't, I will be forced to assume you are merely jealous.

Grandmother's Wooden Stamps

Last year I visited my grandfather in Idaho. One thing I always looked forward to in visiting my grandparents was rummaging through their books and creative supplies. I always had a set of favorite books I needed to find again and reread, and I also looked forward to finding new material that perhaps I wasn't hold enough to appreciate in years previous.

Last year's trip was no different, except I was about 30 years older. I found my old favorite children's books and reminisced over the feelings that these illustrations and stories made me feel. There was a giddy magical feeling to them, in that they only seemed to exist at my grandparents' house. I was not just separated from them by geography: even as a child I knew these books were representative of an entirely different generation from my own.

But this time I dug through the office supplies with intent to chronicle, and I was amazed at what I found. I'll post various of these pictures as we go along, but right now I'll only mention the cork stamps. I think they were cork, or else carved out of some other very soft, light wood. They were manufactured in India, according to their markings, and their surfaces were deeply dark and dyed from dozens of uses.

They were simple floral stylistic designs. I didn't know their exact purpose but I imagine they decorated the corners of pages of writing paper, in a letter to a friend, or the backs of envelopes. Really they could've been stamped anywhere, and a child would have stamped them anywhere, but if an adult had a set of these stamps, I tried to imagine when and why they would use them.

Postmark: 1940

I was very lucky indeed with this find: vintage stamps and postmarks from 70 years ago!

While poking around in Rebecca's parents' house, we found a box of old family photographs. I had no way to record them then, but we wanted to preserve these images and possibly upload them to share. They were wonderful images of the past: outfits, architecture, civic events, holidays, everything that showed what people were doing decades ago.

The next time we went out to Green Bay, I brought my laptop and flatbed scanner plus a backup hard drive, totally ready to scan the hell out of this pile of photographs. Predictably, they had vanished: a friend of the family had cleaned the house and was unavailable when we tried to contact her as to the photos' whereabouts. We don't think she took them, but we absolutely could not find them anywhere we looked (which isn't to say they weren't stuffed somewhere completely obscure).

But in rooting around for them, we found something else entirely: a trove of photos and old Valentine's Day cards from Rebecca's mom's side of the family. Right now I just want to show off these old, old stamps and the perfect specimens of postmarks they present. I will share some of the vintage Valentine's Day cards later, rest assured.

Buddhist Temple Deity

When pen pals send me letters, I love to scan the stamps in and upload them to my Philately folder on Flickr. I'm fortunate in that my pen pals have chosen a unique array of stamps to share with me.

This stamp was puzzling to me because I'm no longer in touch with the person who sent it, and she probably wouldn't have known what it meant anyway. I wanted to know what the image depicted was intended to be: was it a god or a demon? Was it a character from a very popular play? Why is its face chipped on the side? That suggests to me a layer of paint, on the mundane level, but the hair and the underlit features impress me with something more supernatural.

Fortunately, a person who knew found me. A Japanese stamp collector spotted my stamp on Flickr and asked to include it in her vintage stamp group's collection. She said the image was of a Buddhist temple deity, and that the stamp itself was minted in 1971. I thanked her profusely for coming out of the blue and resolving this nagging question in my mind. Can't always rely on that, but it's nice when it happens.

I liked it so much, of course, I incorporated it into the header image of this blog. I wanted some postal images but also something a little out-of-the-ordinary, and I felt this stamp met that challenge.

The Envelope Collective

On November 3, 2005, art students Garrett Miller and Adam Morse initiated the Envelope Collective, a "mail art" project. They invited anyone to send them interesting envelopes and stationery for a collection to be displayed online.

Around April of 2006 someone pointed this project out to me, knowing my interest in letter-writing and making stationery, so I compiled this collection of my efforts to send to them. In the upper left you'll see a simple laser-printer label I'd designed for my return address; upper right, more interestingly, is a picture of my buckle boot, which I'd gotten made into a legal postage stamp through Stamps.com. It's pretty common, old news now, but at the time it was an exciting new feature.

I used this buckle boot motif to create a logo for my personal Web site, Heavy Boots, and applied it throughout my DIY stationery caprices. In the lower left of the envelope you'll see an ink stamp I'd crafted: this was actually my first linocut experiment, and it was pretty elaborate. I took a picture of my boot, shrunk and reversed it in Photoshop, printed it out, pasted it to the linoleum block, then carved around it. That was my first ever attempt at linocutting--as you can see, I'd been dwelling on it for a long time before ever attempting it. The stamp turned out well and I used it in black ink on the front of the envelope and red ink for the pages within. The envelope, of course, was that wonderful Chinese paper with the labeled ideograms and intermittent item/picture. The pages, incidentally, were from an old Bert & Ernie drawing pad from my childhood: I lost it, found it as an adult, and the edges of this cheap paper had started to brown nicely with age. Now I save it for special stationery projects.

The Envelope Collective featured my envelope in their directory and the two guys in charge commented with interest on the postage stamp, adding that they would probably see that feature more heavily used in the future.

Now it looks like the Envelope Collective has shut down, as of 2008, despite their idealism: on their FAQ, when asked about any deadlines, they responded, "This project has no foreseeable end or outcome." Old pages may be found with the Internet WABAC Machine, and a blog entry from 2007. But www.envelopecollective.com is a dead link that returns an error message; however, www.envelopecollective.org takes you to an indie band on MySpace. They don't appear to be related to the art project at all, other than co-opting its name.

Stamps: New Things to Care About

If one is at all open to the idea of letter-writing, finds it at all appealing and discovers within oneself the motivation to continue, one becomes cognizant of certain new things.

One develops a sense of patience as one trains one's own hand to write neatly yet swiftly enough to carry one's thoughts to the page. That's the most difficult trick and quite a common complaint: it's faster to type than to write, and one's handwriting sucks anyway. And I'd be hard-pressed to convince today's generations of this, but it is quite rewarding to sit down and, over the course of several quiet weeks, practice handwriting.

With these come an attention to other details. One starts to critically examine the paper one is writing on. One takes a second look at the pen one is using. One gets excited for little things, like discovering a particularly cunning set of Japanese stationery.

One also looks forward to new stamps. One actually becomes curious about what stamps one's local post office has for sale, and one becomes excited about which stamps are coming soon. One may even become aware of a new level of drama: "The price of stamps is going up next Monday, but for some reason (shakes head, sighs) they aren't releasing the new rate stamps for another month and a half. No telling whose brilliant idea that was."

I picked up these Gulf Coast Lighthouses stamps today, but I'm looking forward to the release of the US Flags this month. When I was in the UK I'd hoped to pick up the McKean/Gaiman Mythical Creatures stamps, but no opportunity presented itself. I never ended up near a post office, and W.H. Smith was fresh out of any kind of postage.

Print Gocco: Wedding Shirts

There is also available a supplementary kit to go with the Print Gocco, and it is a hand-press that uses the Gocco stencils. It is exactly what you might design if you thought about turning an inked-up stencil into a highly mobile printing stamp. The cleverest thing about it are the curved arms you see on the sides. They were not intuitive when I unpackaged this thing but I assembled them faithfully and their use was immediately apparent: they let you rest the hand-press on the table without stamping where you don't want it.

The kit comes with special fabric ink, mind you, so you've got to be careful when using this stuff: it's designed not to wash out. I got the slightest of daubs on a new Calvin Klein shirt, which was instantly transformed into a smock/work shirt.

I printed up these shirts--my wife procured a large amount of black and royal blue T-shirts--for our wedding. They went in a package of gifts to our wedding party, and then were distributed to friends and family with liberal abandon. The image is of my wife and I hurling large dice at each other. Not only did this tie into the game-theme of our wedding/reception, but the faces of the dice contain the date of our marriage: 4/5, or the 5th of April.

Constructing the image for this shirt was a lot of fun. We have large dice-shaped candles so I got a couple close-up shots of them from certain angles. Next I set the camera on a tripod and posed as per my vision for the image, then directed my wife similarly. After that it was all Photoshop: I arranged the cropped images of us relatively near each other, enlarged the dice appropriately and turned them about until it looked much like we were holding them. Then I traced over the whole deal, trying to be mindful of "negative space" (a trick one picks up with linocuts) and printed this last out for my stencil.

I examined a few of my own shirts to find out where most images were positioned--I wouldn't want to start stamping blindly, only to have the first wearer bear us on their collarbones or stomach. It seems that most small images are positioned directly between the bottom seam of the armpits on a shirt, when lain flat. I set up a work table in the basement, cleared off some industrial shelving (each bar of which could allow a shirt to dry), and printed out shirts like a mad bastard. I discovered that much of my detail work from the stencil was lost, so if I print shirts again I certainly won't sweat any details. Gross images and big pictures are the order of that day.

What does this have to do with postal-related topics? Well, it's printing, so you could make a stencil of your own address and stamp it to a package in brown paper or covered in cloth, if you wanted to risk wrapping a package in cloth.

Postcrossing, I Love You

I'm involved with an online pen pal program called Postcrossing. I've tried other free programs but they are largely unmonitored, so all you receive are a bunch of solicitations for scams originating in various west African nations, with maybe a Russian bride offer to mix things up. With Postcrossing, however, you actually get nice postcards from around the world.

These are a couple postcards I've recently received. The one on the left comes from Puerto Rico and the right, obviously, from North Carolina. The U.S. is a big contributor to the program, perhaps by dint of its tremendous population, but frequently I receive addresses to/from Finland and Germany as well.

I'm grateful for the program: I love the access to international postcards as well as the stamps they come with--usually I scan these in and add them to my online collection. I've historically had pretty bad luck with regular pen pals around the world, so this at least satiates my need to talk with new people. I try to send out interesting postcards when it's my turn to issue them. Perhaps the most difficult thing for anyone to do is think of interesting blurbs to write on the back. One guy in Croatia thought he would relate everything the average Croat knew about Minnesota, which was comically little. (It would have been even less if I wrote how much Minnesotans know about Croatia.) I responded with two postcards depicting a map of the state and a list of trivia.

First Entry

This blog is set up so I can brag or rant about stationery adventures.

When I was stationed in S.Korea, in the Army, I maintained 30 active pen pals all across the U.S. Later, I attracted a few (short-lived) international pen pals, about which I was very excited. Friends in Italy and Germany recommended Postcrossing, a system by which complete strangers can send each other postcards from around the world!

I love letters. I love writing them and everyone loves receiving them.

I also explored crafting my own stationery for a while: I got into linocutting and stamp-making; I created letterhead and patterned writing paper; I constructed my own envelopes and mailers. That was a lot of fun to do, but... not everyone is into writing letters, and few of mine garnered responses.

That was discouraging, and I put much less energy into it now.

But hopefully this blog will rejuvenate my own interest. I'll cover the postcards I exchange, show off my DIY stationery efforts, go into etymology and linguistics, and blather about anything relevant to this irresistible passion of mine.

And if I make a few new pen pals in the process, um so besser!