Cats, Goats and Time

Always good to find a full post office box, these were some of the pieces waiting for me on Saturday:

1. Via Correo Gato from Puerto Rico a catchy envelope and two pieces form Piro Rios.  Cats rule the internaet and mail art.
2. Amy Irwen sent a “time warp” from Minnesota.
3. R.F. Côté sent a nice collage from Québec.
4. A card with a skull (I didn’t see at first) from Carolyn Oord in Québec with a mountain goat postage stamp on the other side.
5. And speaking of goats, as in Year of the Goat (or Ram if you insist), Chinese New Year greetings from Barbara Stasiowski.

Hiding Postcards in Books

In 2013 I started sending out mail art that was intended for the recipients to hide the art in a book.   A new set of ten pieces going out today.  Paintings of bookcases on unused franked postcards form the 1980s.  I needed to augment the original postage with additional stamps.  In this case some even older unused stamps.  If you receive a piece and hide it, years from now it will be a bit confusing to the finder as it will have postage from different decades.

When it rains it pours....

After a very rainy weekend I found my P.O. Box was flooded with some good stuff on Monday, including these pieces of mail art:

1. Barbara Stasiowski’s beautiful, textural piece looks like it’s still wet, but no worries, it came through the mail just fine.
2. Dori Singh’s rather racy valentine made me smile and also think of those sexy mud flaps some truckers have on their rigs. 
3. Angela Behrendt’s used one of the tickets I sent last year on the envelope and the piece inside.
4. E. Coles sent another piece and she’s been up to Birmingham and saved the train tickets for me (now that’s a valentine!).
5. I get more valentines now that I do mail art than I ever did.  Thanks to Katerina Nikoltou for sending this one all the way from Greece.
6. Gregg Biggs sent this amazing little façade with button door. 
7. More grooviness form Serse Luigetti in Italy – I am building up quite a collection of his prints.
8. And finally, Punkie Ebert sent a tell tale, thumping valentine from up in Marin.

Thank you everyone, more mail art will be going out soon from San Francisco.

The Larkin Story – a Preview

This is one of the more unusual postcards that I have added to my collection.  It is a folding postcard that would be sealed and addressed on the outside.  This one was mailed in 1913 after a visit to the Larkin Soap Company.  The Buffalo-based company is largely forgotten today, but, in it’s day, the Larkin Soap Company was a well known company for soap, dry goods other groceries and household products, even furniture.  Adjacent to the factory was a state-of-the-art company headquarters designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.  A little more history is at this link. 

The Larkin Soap Company also plays a major role in the upcoming book Helen’s Postcards.  Helen worked at the factory in 1915 packing and fulfilling orders of soap and men’s shaving kits.  She and her coworkers would slip in little pieces of paper with their names and addresses on them.  Imagine instead of finding a piece of paper that read Inspected by #17, you found a young lady’s address!  This lead to a number of pen pals and plenty of postcards arriving in her mailbox from all over the country.  One of her coworkers eventually met her husband this way.

Details from these stories and plenty of the postcards will be included in Helen’s Postcards.  To guarantee you receive a copy of the book, be sure to support the Kickstarter project and preorder a book before February 28th. 

Winter Mail

It may not have rained all of January but there has been no drought in the P.O. Box.   Purple seems to be a trend so far in 2015, we’ll see if that continues.   Some of the latest pieces I have received include:

1. Pamela Gerard sent a ticket themed piece.  This may be the first magenta tickets, so far.
2. Susanna Lakner’s piece is a multilingual ticket extravaganza.
3. Fleur Helsingor sent me one of her Visiting Old Oakland series.  The brick wall in the image was built from repurposed bricks after the old Oakland High School was torn down in 1940.
4. The Artist in Seine (aka Dean Marks) sent me some Deep Nature. 
5. Karen Isaacson’s true fact made it from Massachusetts.  Unsurprisingly it feels very snowy.
6. Virgo Samara sent a colorful piece form Russia using the newspaper TV listings for an envelope.  At least I think they are TV listings, I don’t speak Russian.
7. And some New Year’s greeting from Jennie Hinchliff.  A little known fact – our P.O. Boxes are just a few steps from each other in the Upper Haight.