Vintage Postcards for Creative Correspondence

One thing I've noticed lately on Tumblr is that a lot of youth are getting interested in "old-fashioned" correspondence. One user I follow regularly posts ads from girls aged 16-24 looking for pen pals. They're so anxious to reach out and connect, exploring postcards and hand-written letters as the vehicle.

I think this is marvelous and would do anything to encourage this. Obviously it's inappropriate for so many reasons for me to offer to write with them, but what can I do to foster this? If anything, I need to embody this practice by actually writing to the people I'm supposed to be writing to. I have excuses, but I would rather sit down and make time to cultivate these postal relationships.

But at least there is room to let people know where to go for resources. If you have someone to write to (or several someones, hopefully), you can pick up good pens at an art store, and maybe Barnes & Noble or Paper Source will have interesting letter sets. This is only a step up from the most rudimentary and basic form: using whatever pen/pencil you have lying around the house and filling up a couple pages of notebook paper. You can get as fancy or as minimalist as you like.

For people who are looking for something more interesting than a dozen souvenir postcards had from any gas station or gift shop, think about this: antique stores. If you're not too precious about marring a token of history, think about it as fulfilling an old postcard's Zen purpose. Seriously, many antique shops will have a selection of vintage cards somehow unused for the past several decades! Most of the time you'll find them neat and orderly, grouped by theme or geography, but today at Hunt & Gather (in my new neighborhood) I found, in the corner of the sprawling basement space, a disheveled bin of vintage postcards, marked down from what you can usually expect to pay for these things. It was a dream! If I didn't already have a small mountain of postcard books and vintage cards salvaged from cleaning out my wife's former childhood home, I would've just stuck two fists in and hauled my catch up, sight unseen, to the cash register.

So think about that. Find a nice pen, hit up the post office for interesting stamps, and haunt your local antique stores for amazing postcards. Every one loves receiving personal mail, and there are so many little ways to heighten the experience.

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.

Minneapolis Postcard Collections

Once in a while, I discover something interesting embedded in the details of my city. I hope that such is the case with everyone, that I'm not the only one learning new things about their hometown, or that everyone lives somewhere with interesting things to uncover.

Image: Old Minneapolis Postcards

I learned a new word, for instance, when I discovered the Twin City Postcard Club of Minnesota. They describe themselves as deltiologists, "deltion" being Greek for writing tablet or letter. While I have two boxes of new postcards waiting to go out and twice that in cards I've received from around the world, I wouldn't classify myself as a deltiologist: my own collection is haphazard and byzantine, while these guys seem disciplined and focused on accruing a thematically consistent collection.

Here is an online gallery of vintage Minneapolis postcards, but if you're in the Minneapolis area, you must visit the Central Library. It's a beautiful structure in itself—one cool feature is the digital display of books being returned, broadcast on the sides of the elevators as they rise and lower—but here you will find the historic Minneapolis postcard collection in the Special Collections department. It's my intention to set up an appointment and bring some friends to check it out, because now I'm curious to learn what treasures are stored.

Postcards Maintain Friendship

"The postcard maintains the friendship."


I have nothing more to add to this.

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.

Knisper! Knasper! Knusper!

More plundering of the in-laws' house has turned up this gem:

Amazingly, it fell out of a book I had intended to read. No sooner did I open the hard cover than it came sliding out, into my palm. On the back is stamped: "© 1970 KELLOGG CO." and it feels like it's made of a very soft plastic. Not quite rubber and not dissimilar to today's silicon products, it's at once sturdy and flexible.

This thing was manufactured the year I was born! (And yes, my 40th birthday's coming up and I'm pretty displeased about that.) Look at the difference between the toy surprise of yesteryear and the crap we get today. Four decades ago, a kids' cereal company thought nothing of crafting a complex stencil of its own breakfast mascots for the entertainment of children! Today, you get some doodle on a piece of cardboard or an injection-molded animal on wheels that don't work. (And let's not even bring Cracker Jack's inglorious fall into this.)

This stencil, being made the year of my birth and having survived twoscore years intact--indeed, nigh-pristine--I had no other choice than to mark an impression with the stencil onto paper. I found a nice, dark gel pen and tried to put it into the first sluice of Crackle's hat... and was blocked. The slits were far too narrow for a pen. I selected a long, thin pencil with a very slender tip and discovered this, too, was still too thick for the stencil. Any child who first attempted to utilize this "toy" doubtlessly met with the same mounting frustration and irritation I began to experience.

However, I have an unreasonable and desultory collection of writing implements. It was no effort to find a mechanical pencil and extend the lead too far for writing but just perfect for this stencil. When I completed Crackle's head, however, I decided this was too demanding an effort with too little kickback to merit completing the trio. Making sure every last tiny space and dot was filled up was tedious, and compressing the stencil rigidly in place with my other hand developed a burning cramp in my forearm. In the end I had a seat on the porch--our weather is currently lovely--and discovered the necessity for more than adequate lighting for this activity: many of the slits are so small and thin they cannot be detected in light any degree of dim.

My cat hopped up into the chair beside me and kept me company while I traced out these three friends. I heard an anecdote that these elfin figures represented three Depression-era immigrant groups, revealed by their costumes: Snap was some form of Scand (my memory is leaky on this point, and what nation wears both chef's hats and neckerchiefs?), Crackle was French, and Pop was German. However, I was completely unable to find anything to corroborate this theory online, the past having been rewritten. Anyway, ten minutes later I had my tableau.

It seems that the succession of faces degenerated, purely the fault of the stencil. I had some fun coloring in Crackle's hat, but coloring in Pop's entire eye made me wonder what had gone wrong. Perhaps nothing is meant to be colored in by the pencil: you simply trace the outline and then color it in? That sounds reasonable, though those lines are so freakin' thin, there's very little coloring to be done.

And, of course, they look nothing like their contemporary interpretation:

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.)

To Slice, Glue, and Rearrange

I first read about this form of collage as "Victorian collage," probably in The Surrealist's Handbook or something. Victorian women used to amuse themselves by cutting out pictures from newspapers and magazines and gluing them together in whimsical, imaginative rearrangements. You can imagine how appealing a group like the Surrealists would have found this and soon it was the rage. Even today, when someone wishes to represent the jumbled thoughts of insanity, an artist may find it convenient to fall back on Victorian imagery for a somewhat nightmarish effect.

I have no such imagery. Well, I do, but it's in its original form and I'm not going to savage it just to make tawdry, half-conceived artistic stabs. I do, however, have other magazines with beautiful, stylized photography. For this card I used an old map of Tokyo, recreated by Cavallini Papers & Co., and then cut out pictures of arms from an old issue of Flaunt Magazine. The hand with the compass was from a Hennessey ad, the girl's hand from an ad for Bioshock, and the jack-all-points arm from some tedious photo shoot for a clothing designer. You know how those go. Well, they're not entirely without worth, as you can slit out a limb or maybe an intact garment for superimposition.

I had an X-acto knife on hand and recently purchased extra-strength glue stick. I glued the blank postcards onto the back of the map first and then cut them out, to ensure they would lay flush to the edges. I had no vision for the imagery to start with, just cut out an arm and then found two more. I lucked out with the "tomorrow calls," though, also unplanned.

And many people on Postcrossing object to homemade cards (for reasons unknown to me) but I still think cards like this will come in handy in special occasions. And I can scan them in for my own portfolio, and even upload them to any of the dozens of online postcard-printing operations (I've had success with Zazzle in the past) that have sprung up in recent years.

Update: Made some more cards. Expanding collection will be archived here.

Daabs-Attest, 1888

This was a funny little project that went nowhere. I'm tying it into stationery interests because it involves an antique, old handwriting, and very old newspaper.

My wife brought me out to yet another thrift store last year--she's a great fan of these places and I can't deny she's come away with some impressive scores at local outlets like Saver's, Salvation Army and Ragstock. They're just not my thing unless I'm trying to assemble a Hallowe'en costume, though I used to hit Ragstock quite frequently as my source for military surplus coats and bookbags. Anyway, this time we went to ARC Value Village and I was surprised to find three very nice sweaters, a satisfyingly terrible Conan the Barbarian comic, and this thing.

I'm not saying I'm mystically inclined or anything, but when I pulled this frame out of a sloppy array of other frames, I couldn't put it back. It looked like an important document some family lost--I couldn't imagine someone selling it to a thrift store, so perhaps it ended up here after an estate sale, like, all leftover and unclaimed property could have been distributed to a thrift outlet. Is that reasonable? Does that happen?

It was a certificate in a stout wooden frame, and I couldn't understand the language in which it was written. Something about it seemed very important to me so I picked it up for a couple bucks. Once home, I immediately began to disassemble it into its component parts (with my cat's help, pictured). I polished the glass, which was unevenly cut on a couple corners, with jagged teeth extending beyond the intended dimensions of the pane. It's like someone wasn't paying attention or didn't like their job.

It had seen a lot of action in its day, as evidenced by the damage sustained to the wooden frame at the corners. When the glass was out I spent a lot of time polishing it up and saw that some flaws were inherent to the manufacturing process, like interesting little striations of bubbles and warps in the glass here and there. Time had also marred it with little stains and scratches, those couldn't be helped. As for the frame, I took to it with wood soap and tried to replenish this parched fiber as much as I could. I have no idea whether I improved it at all but it did look a little nicer when I was done.

I bent the tiny nails in the back, removed the wood panel behind the pane, and extricated the document. Online research suggested to me it was written in Norwegian and was a birth certificate for someone. That's quite reasonable: my area is typified by its population of Norwegian Lutheran settlers (see also: the Coen brothers' Fargo). I figured, once the frame was reassembled, I might contact Mindekirke and see whether they had any interest in this thing, or else the Minnesota Historical Society. Out of reverence for the object, I hope they do and that this testament to someone's birth isn't kicked to the curb yet again.

Behind the birth certificate, however, between it and the wood backing were a couple sections of folded newspaper. This is the kind of find I dream about but only hear about happening to other people, usually when they're tearing a house down or stripping the upholstery off an old couch. Someone had packed a couple pages of the now-extinct Minnesota Times. Research shows me this started as the Daily Times in 1854, then soon converted into the Weekly Times. Now, the information I'm reading, the Minnesota Historical Bulletin, says that the Times merged with the St. Paul Press in 1861, but the issue I scanned here shows the death of Colonel Albert Lea which occurred in 1891, suggesting the Times was intact three decades after it was supposed to have been subsumed by the other paper. I don't know what to make of that.

...Oh, wait, this is the Minneapolis Times, which ran from 1889 to 1948. Never mind, that's completely reasonable. Anyway, I scanned in the birth certificate--too large to fit my scanner, I'll reassemble it in Photoshop--and all the newspaper stored in the frame. I think these are all marvelous documents and I wonder whether anyone besides me will think them useful at all.

Information Tends to be Freed

Here's something funny: I was dinking around online last night and found, through nebulous contrivance, a Web site new to me, Is This Your Name. You type your name in and it does a multi-platform Web search for you, turning up all sorts of results ranging from the practical to the amusing. From there, you can see who else shares your name, where you've implanted yourself... and who's borrowing stuff from you.

Inspired by a class I took at Metro State, one focusing on children's literature, I dug out some old books from my childhood and scanned in their endpapers.


End papers for McCall's Giant Golden Make-It Book, Simon and Schuster, 1953.

Without being conscious of it, the decorative endpapers were as dear to me as anything else inside or outside the book. I smiled to see them again, this capricious little design meant to serve as nothing but filler and perhaps some foreshadowing to the book's contents. Endpapers also help establish an atmosphere for the reader, and especially in children's literature their design is a strategic deliberation.

What Is This You showed me was that there were a couple of admirers of my scanned-in endpapers that I didn't know about. They each credited me, and if they hadn't I'm sure I wouldn't have heard of this at all.

The blog Yara Kono, in Portuguese, found it and cited me as "Christian Wilkie" (the surname I will be changing to soon). But the Babelfish program is inadequate to translate the author's caption into anything comprehensible.

Similarly, Kelly Rakowski, who maintains a very interesting archive at Nothing is New, has an account with vi.sualize.us (a "social bookmarking" site I've never heard of) and kept track of the endpapers here. She credits me as "Christian Fredrickson" and it's interesting to me to see who chose what name for me.

Not that interesting, I guess. And I'm not upset that they posted the image: it wasn't mine to begin with, it was only my uncommon find, and each did credit me appropriately. I would've liked a linkback and an e-mail notification, but those are just my druthers. They did everything just fine. And the issue is quite moot anyway: these posts are well over 15 months old, so it's been going on for a while. In all likelihood there are many other places also referencing this picture that I know nothing about. The discovery of Is This Your Name only reinforces how large the Internet is, to the point where sections of it are practically inaccessible (barring luck and chance).

Exploring Semiotics

Don't you hate it when you have a GIF and it's a tedious and stupid trial to convert it to a JPG? I did not save this item as a GIF, it's terrible GIF material, but that's how it landed in my hard drive. I hate that.

Also... no one really knows why there's writing on this skull. There are dozens of skulls like this in the same gallery--we might call it an ossuary--and many of them also have writing across their foreheads, and many of the words can be translated (but not all), and to this day we're not precisely sure of the function of this. Were they curses? Were they identification? Were they simply reminders?

It looks creepy, but it also looks really cool. Of course it looks cool! It's a skull with awesome handwriting: two incredibly cool things! Would I decorate a room in such skulls? I would, until I got creeped out.

But what does this skull say to you? When you glance at it, what is the message that flashes through your own head? What do you suppose the function of that handwriting could possibly be? Does this image make you feel a connection with the past, like some isolated group of people were doing their best to reach forward into the future and connect with some unknown reader? Or does it make you feel threatened, like there's much more to the world than you were previously aware, and there's much you don't understand?

How else could you achieve this effect? What else could you use to strike your impressions of the skull into the imagination of another viewer? What other effect could you achieve that would evoke the same emotions as that dignified handwriting?

And if you ever found yourself in a position where your only reasonable course of action was to inscribe a message upon the skull of a deceased person, what do you think your motives would be? What could have driven you to such straits, beyond a simple lack of paper?

Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 1873

Not the greatest quality scan, but I have the source material and I can do it better in the future.

For that matter, I have a broad selection of old images to choose from: a couple weeks ago I attended an antique sale during Defeat of Jesse James Days in Northfield, MN, and came away with two hardcover books. One was a collection of Dorothy Parker short stories and the other was a collection of Harper's New Monthly Magazine vol. 48, comprising all issues from Dec. 1873 to May 1874.

Gods know I could've snatched up all those volumes, of which there were four or five, I think, off that table, but there's no need to be greedy. One volume of six issues is enough for me, with a wonderful selection of old illustrations and woodcuts, not to mention the original writing of the period, both journalistic and fictional work! There's even a gossip page in which a writer, Maunsell B. Field, relates anecdotes about his encounters with Charles Dickens, Pope Gregory XVI, and his service under President Lincoln. It's great reading, and I look forward to finding cause to employ so many dozens of these wonderful, forgotten illustrations in new applications.

The Dickeyville Grotto

Here's a souvenir postcard gotten from the Holy Ghost Church in Dickeyville, Wisconsin. Sounds innocuous, right?

My wife and I were driving back from our road trip from Iowa when I noticed a series of large plaster/mosaic structures on my left. Thinking it was a Mexican Dia de los Muertos exhibit, or something related, I pulled over immediately and we went to check it out.

"The Dickeyville Grotto and Shrines erected in the Village of Dickeyville, Wisconsin on Holy Ghost Parish grounds are the works of Father Matthias Wernerus, a Catholic Priest, Pastor of the Parish from 1918 to 1931. His handiwork in stone, built from 1925-1930, is dedicated to the unity of two great American ideals-love of God and love of Country."

Wow. It's insane to walk through, and the back story is almost as colorful. I'd never heard of it before and found it entirely by accident. Rebecca had a dim view of this particularly fanatical display of religio-nationalism, whereas I found it an interesting psychological study.

In the gift shop I found this postcard (pictured) and what's interesting is that they don't seem to be recreations. They may be, the paper is fresh and not yellowed on the edges, but if they are recreations it's interesting the printer chose to retain the "place one cent stamp here" instructions. But what a find that would be, to discover a cache of original, yet-unsold souvenir postcards from four decades ago! I grabbed ten of them: even if they're reprints, they're still very attractive cards of the bygone era. Look at those cars!

Language Shift

This is an old poem from an old children's book I've successfully managed to hold onto nearly my entire life. I think it's the oldest souvenir from the earliest reach of my lifespan that I currently possess. That sounds unwieldy but I trust you know what I'm trying to say.

I won the book as part of a contest in elementary school, when I attended St. Joseph's in Chehalis, WA. I think it was in second grade: at the end of the year, Mrs. Ludvickson (I can recall the names of my 2nd and 3rd grade teachers, but not 1st grade) had a series of contests and was giving, as prizes, little tokens we'd spent the year with: room decorations, books, props, etc. This particular children's book is from the early 1900's and our teacher read from it or had us read from it frequently.

I was starved to know all of the stories and poems inside it, and I was deeply, deeply attracted to the '20s art deco style it affected. I have no idea whether anyone else in my class gave a rat's ass about this book, but I absolutely had to have it. How fortunate for me, then, that I bested the contest for this book (now I disremember what it was) and brought it home, this treasured prize. That means I've had it for 31 years, and the book itself was much older than that when I won it.

As for this poem, I discovered my wife cannot read it without breaking into giggles.

Nostalgia in 4" x 6"

There comes a time, in correspondence as with everything else, when you have to give up something that means a lot to you. In the realm of stationery, maybe you've held onto an item for too long without having used it sufficiently; maybe it's taking up space and you can't justify retaining it any longer; maybe you know someone who would like it better.

This is one postcard among many in my collection, and I just decided I had to give it up. It's an image from a collector of retro memorabilia, a photograph of these little cards called "Winky Dinks," I believe. It's that simple Cracker Jack prize concept: the front is a corrugation of little triangular rows that emphasize one gatework of printed image or another--you wiggle it back and forth to see the different scenes and in this manner the illusion of movement is suggested. These cards in particular demonstrated old dance moves from the '60s, and you turned the cards back and forth to see how the simple steps were achieved. (Hullabaloo was a popular dance/music show of the era, kind of like American Bandstand.)

It's nothing big, nothing to scream about. The postcard itself did not achieve this effect. Why does this card mean so much to me? Personal reasons: where I got it, where I was in life when I picked it up, things like that which it represents to me. But now I have to think about conservancy of physical space, and since virtual space is so vast and cheap right now, I scanned the card in and kept it that way. This postcard went to China, received by a young woman who appreciated it.

So it goes.

Project Pendemonium: Success!

It was awesome! Pendemonium is at the southeastern-most corner of Iowa, so we woke up early Saturday morning... dawdled... and then took off. My navigator slept through our turn at Mason City so I didn't realize how off-course we were until Des Moines, but my own superior navigation skills charted a new course to Fort Madison and we showed up at the store at half an hour before close!

I had a great talk with the owner, chatting about pens and paper supplies. He illuminated me as to the Rhodia/Moleskine debate. The fact remains that I love Moleskine but I understand not every pen will take to it well, as its batches of paper are inconsistent. Rhodia has released a "web book" that emulates Moleskine's hardcover and elastic binder function, but I don't think it looks as nice. I have a deep emotional investment with Moleskine and I can't casually switch over to Rhodia even in light of this new information.

I picked up a Shakespeare-nib quill, a Pelikan refillable calligraphy pen, a Turkish woven bookmark (such as may be had up here, but now I can look at it and say I got it at Pendemonium), some homemade stationery-themed cards, and an antique inkwell. Fort Madison is such a flat, small, and empty town--most of its businesses were closed for the weekend, and those that weren't were still closing at 4:00 PM--and I wonder how a specialty store like Pendemonium can stay open. They do seem to enjoy substantial online business, which is great, but I wonder if they could appeal to the kids by providing pen pal URLs (not the least of which would be Postcrossing) and give some pleasant diversion to teenagers otherwise whiling away their time in an empty town.

That's what I would explore, if I were stuck there (and not old enough to hang out in Lost Duck Brewery).

If I'm Permitted to Dream

Three years ago I visited an Independence Day celebration, "Fort Snelling, 1827." Fort Snelling is situated by the international airport in Bloomington, and each July they open the fort with recreationists and actors who enact various scenes, from mundane routines to special speeches and proclamations.

I believe this photo was taken in an officer's quarters, which is why it is so clean of straw and mud and uncluttered with bags and cases. It's a quiet room with a solid wooden desk, a comfortable wooden chair with padded leather, a solid brick floor set right into the ground (no echoing floorboards, no creaking, no carpet to fight), and a single inkwell waiting at one corner of the desktop. Missing would be a desk set, like a desk pad, paper holder, rack for quills, etc.

And me. I could write endlessly in this room. I would throw the windows open by day and write by candles or oil lamps by night. One wall would have a small and essential library: one shelf dedicated to copyediting, technique and usage; one for my most favorite novels and excellent examples of writing; one for my college textbooks on writing and craft, collections of The Paris Interviews and maybe a subscription to Granta or Utne Reader, just to keep abreast of different styles; one shelf would be a random assortment of books on loan, constantly updating, getting replaced. To the side would be my stationery chest, with a more serious collection of paper, inks, nibs, and accoutrement. Here I'd lock up anything that wasn't in use on my desk.

Against the other wall would be a dresser or armoire with as many clothes as I'd need for two weeks. With one collapsible cot and a sleeping bag, I should be quite comfortable in this room alone. And from this room I would reach the world--slowly, unreliably, but I would transmit and receive from this station.

And if I had the Internet... good night.

Republik Maluku Selatan

Here are two stamps that should not appear in any reputable collection, apparently. They are known as bogus stamps, are not official postage, and were printed by a private interest on behalf of the South Moluccas.

The South Moluccas are a group of 150 islands between Indonesia and Australia, south of Malaysia. They are not a major world power, they are certainly not a sovereign nation; they do not have an indomitable army, navy, or air force. They are not a predominant world economy. And they have never printed official, legal postage stamps for themselves.

Henry Stolow, a certain stamp dealer operating in Berlin and New York, ordered 150 sets of these stamps from Austria in 1955 and apparently sold and distributed these. Being that there is no Republic of South Moluccas, inclusion of these stamps into any responsible philatelic collection spelled disaster for the collector. Why would he do such a thing? Vengeance? Power-mongering? Simple whim? The world may never know.

And yet somehow I have come into possession of two of these stamps. How? From where? I have no idea. I was just cleaning out my stationery supplies and I found a small, yellowing paper packet with several stamps in it. One's from Romania, one's a Bulgarian stamp celebrating with 100-year mark of the April Uprising, one's from Poland and it features a thistle. But here are also two bogus stamps from a fake nation, which I actually think (given their history) makes them especially cool.

Victorian Punk

Anything, literally anything can be used to make interesting or evocative stationery. Pictured here are old illustrations of hellebore and belladona plants. I situated them on the page and beneath them probably typed out "Fig. 27: Belladona" in some loopy Edwardian font. The impression was to recall an antiquated biology textbook: lacking one, I replicated the effect.

Being that I was into the gothic subculture at the time, and writing to people of like mind, this was an eminently appropriate choice of flora for stationery. These are poisonous plants and bring to mind someone like Lucrezia Borgia or whatever romanticized and insane historical figure. It's the drama, the romanticism I was going for with this project.

It was nothing at all to find suitable woodcuts or illustrations that could be stratified into stark black-and-white imagery for this purpose. With the intention of slicing an 8.5"x11" sheet of paper in half, I would print two images to a page, halve the sheet, and start writing on a document of a less intimidating and demanding size than a full piece of paper, if I should choose. (As it ended up, usually, I would bind four of these smaller pieces of paper together--two sheets in total, writing front and back--so it was nothing more than a psychological palliative.)