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| Henry Lambskull, The Cottage, Sevenoaks, posted 1891 |
Many things, many things to show you. I decided to visit each of the blogs / websites in my list of mail art related links. You can find that list on the left hand side of the screen if you're on a computer. The drop down menu, if you're on your phone, is in the upper left corner. Then I also decided to check out the internet-at-large to see what bounty the near-endless seas of the internet might provide for us.
Here's everything in no particular order. It's just all thrown in there for you to make whatever sense you want to make of it. I will sometimes include some of my thoughts or include text from the source website where I found the stuff.
The early mail art rebuses (above and below) are kind of fun. The rebus was popular in mail art from the mid 1800s to the early 1930s, according to Faithful Readers.
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| G. Bilby 8 Crutched Friars, posted 1895 |
Article alert: Harboring Hidden Histories: Mail Art’s Reception in United States Institutional Archives by John Held, Jr.
Lenore Tawney began creating postcard collages in the 1960s, while she was moving between studios and traveling internationally. Though she left Chicago, the artist maintained a longstanding friendship with Katherine Kuh, the curator of European art and sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago. The two exchanged mail art over the course of their long friendship [Source: Art Institute Chicago].
The Gutai artists utilized nengajo (年賀状) or nenga-hagaki (年賀はがき), which translates to new year’s postcards, for their mail art. The Japanese custom of sending written new year’s greetings dates back to at least the Heian era (794–1185) when the nobility began writing to people who lived too far away for face-to-face greetings.
When Japan’s postal service introduced postcards in 1871, they were the perfect medium for these messages that required only the text “Happy New Year” alongside one’s name and address. The tradition has been preserved since then and has become one of the most common new year’s celebrations throughout the history of Japan. [Source: Art Institute Chicago].
Reminder: White Sanctum in India always has monthly mail art calls.
Postal chess, also known as correspondence chess, is a cousin of mail art and was a thing before internet chess became a thing. A person could just write the locations of the pieces with a boring pen, but there were those who decided to do it with rubber stamps.
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| from 1945, seen on eBay |
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| from 1945, seen on eBay |
You can still find some of the old outfits on ebay and other auction sites. Or you can buy a new set from
Casey Rubber Stamps if you want. Today, these are most likely going to be used for making flash cards for study...or...mail art, though some people might still use them for correspondence games.
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| Chess Type Stamping Outfit, circa 1940s to 1960s |
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| Chess Type Stamping Outfit, circa 1940s to 1960s |
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| ^^^ From Nirvana's Krist Novoselic to Jon Foster ^^^ |
Ruth-Wolf Rehfeldt died on February 26, 2024 at the age of 92 – with this special issue we want to say goodbye. All appropriate submissions have been selected to give everyone the opportunity to pay tribute to Ruth's work and life – so this issue of ToCall is a double edition. The traditional one-word poem on the front cover is based on the piece “Concrete Architecture” by Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt. Printed with mimeograph duplicators Gestetner 160 and Gestetner 320. Edition of 100 copies [Source: PSW Gallery].
From Facebook, an eye catching set of jumbling, tumbling lines.by Laura Pintus.
Some outgoing rubber stampings on a submission to Michael Orr's Predictions project. The magicians, working with the locomotive, are using their powers to get the houses to cooperate and go along with where the train engine is trying to take them.
I already mailed my predictions off to M. Orr, so I can't scan them now, but I will re-create them here:
Humans will keep getting more and more technologically advanced and in a few centuries will have solved all problems (medical, political, financial, environmental, natural resources, etc)...hopefully ethically. Unless we revert to some new stone age and global civilizational collapse.
We're going to have to colonize space. Some thousands of years for now, people will become so technologically advanced that they will be pretty god-like, and in their new statuses as deities will create new universes. It's going to be wild. Look...it took billions of years for humans to show up. Then hundreds of millions of years for them to invent the refrigerator and telephone. Then came the internet about a century later. The pace of technological development has increased exponentially.
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Below, please find something I made in 2015. That was nine years ago. Not sure who I sent it to at this point. Time really does fly sometimes. Other times, it seems like it's moving at a snail's pace. Facebook sent me a reminder.
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| T. Brown, 2015 |
Always, thanks for reading. If you've enjoyed your stay at the Hotel Mail Art News, I ask you to share with friends, relatives, co-workers...anyone who might be interested in the subject matter presented. If you want to volunteer or collaborate, send me a message. If you're a super cool and / or neurotic mail artist and you'd like to do an interview, also send me a message. Stay hydrated.
Ah, yes. The New Year postcards. A video game I was playing had those in them.
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