My tidy haul of ephemerality.
Part way between our Styversant Heights hideout and the big city was the Dumbo Sunday Brooklyn Flea, a small, well formed market of vintage goods. A perfect way to spend a morning before heading to Central Park for a family picnic (if a Saturday works better for you, then Williamsburg is the place to wander sinfully amongst the stalls of retro nonsense).
US FDC's and old school bingo cards were a dollar a pop.
A small portion of Japan, from 1959. I tried finding out something about the 20th Congress of the International Air Transport Association but, alas, I could find nothing to enlighten us. I did find a film about PanAm and the Boeing 707 from the same year…
Then these two films about the 377 Stratocruiser…
West Germany, 1973:
Four lovely stamps highlighting environmental waste issues are released.
I'm sure Expo 70 was a marvellous thing. I've never been to a World Fair – to me they seem like a thing of the Victorian era, full of fantastical inventions, sights and sounds. But of course they are as much a part of the present and the future…and the past…everywhen, really.
Expo 70 was held in Osaka, Japan and was where the USA displayed a lump of moon rock they'd picked up the year before. It's Landmark Tower inspired the designers of the Valley Forge from Silent Running and the site was used to film the final battle between Gamera and Jiger in the Japanese monster movie…Gamera vs. Jiger, obviously.
And then, there were these stamps.
Visual delights from the East, in the form of first days covers, from the late 60s through to the beginning of the 80s. Like all countries Japan has produced some absolutely stunning stampage (as illustrated here) and many cubic tonnes of self-adhesive shite.
I can’t tell you very much about Hans Thoni except that he died in 1980 aged 74 and was a Swiss graphic designer. There are a few of his posters online and some stamps he designed. There’s much more online about Finsteraarhorn, the highest and less popular mountain in the Bernese Alps.
It’s nothing personal, Finsteraarhorn is, I believe, a perfectly respectable Alp, It’s just that it’s hard to get to. And I don’t mean ‘no public transport’ hard to get to, I mean it’s in the middle of flipping nowhere. It’s, what we explorers call, “a very very long way away”.
Of course, I’m an armchair explorer really and would much rather scrutinise the results of a tectonic uplift from the comfort and relative warmth of my living room, with or without Kendal Mint Cake…
Thoni’s economic illustration of Finsteraarhorn is as sparse as a mountaineer’s emergency rations after three days of blizzard-bound isolation. I count three colours and really, not much drawing. But everything is just right. Just as it should be.
I’m a little obsessed by this tiny depiction of a very big thing.
They said it couldn’t be done. They said, it was impossible. They said that 'The Thing' could not ‘travel’ to 'The Place'; that it could not happen. It was impossible.
Even now, some claim that it did not happen. They claim that it could not have happened. But let me tell you, with complete certainty, that it did happen. I know. I was there. I saw it.
Yes…the postman really did post a commemorative 45” single from 1969 through our letterbox. A letterbox, notably, not big enough for this vintage News of the World give-away. A letterbox that measures less than the requisite 7” across, at its widest point.
So how did he do it? I here you ask. HTF? (As the younger generation might abbreviate). How was it possible to bend the laws of physics, to pervert known science – to make something so big, fit through something so not big? How?
By bending it. By fecking bending it.
But this was no flexidisc, oh no. This disc did not flex. Or bend. It did not bend and it did not flex. It did not fold and it did not contort. It did, what it had to do. All that it could do.
It fecking broke.
We can send a man to the moon. We can record the account of that journey and we can press that account into a disc of plastic to be played back using a turny thing and a needle. We can package that disc of plastic inside a printed account of the remarkable happenings of that time. We can slip both disc and leaflet into a printed space map depicting the journey made all those years ago. And we can stick all that stuff into a specially manufactured glossy card sleeve with a moon boot on the front.
But we can’t post all that shit through a hole smaller than it without something happening that is not supposed to happen. It's a scientific fact.
[Report Ends]
I tend to keep my stamps loose or mounted onto small white cards that I file in a box. I'm fighting the conventional and accepted forms of stamp collection/preservation, in my own small way. Maybe one I'll curse my chosen path. I think I'm going to frame these and leave them to the ravages of everyday light attacks.
I'm immersed in heritage-related projects at the moment. It's really interesting. The studio I'm working in has two "interpretive planners", who know tons of history and that. They're fascinating. It's all quite different to what I'm used to but refreshingly so. Lots of challenges; I'm covering for a super-talented creative with a real passion for history – formidable shoes to fill. Anyway, I was reminded of this, from when I was…oooh, about knee high.
It was during this year that SAVE Britain's Heritage was created, "the most influential conservation group to have been established since William Morris founded the Society for the Protection of Ancient Beards", or something.
I'm going to try something for a while and see if it gets annoying. There's a load of stuff back there in the Ace Jet Archive. I love going through it every now and then. Like these superb Dutch stamps. Well worth re-visiting. Well, I think so anyway.
I don't know if anyone remembers but a while back Michael Russem from the Kat Ran Press in Cambridge, Massachusetts, sent me the rather marvellous Eric Gill, Notes on Postage Stamps that revealed (well, OK, maybe just hinted at) Gill's fundamentally bad attitude to the commissions presented to him.
Michael's done it again. This time sending Postage Stamps by AIGA Medalists. It's a fascinating review of some of the most interesting winners from the last hundred years or so. It includes such luminaries as Lucian Bernhard, Dwiggins, Lester Beall, a collaborative set involving Herb Lubalin, Josef Albers, Armin Hofman, a stunner from Thomas Geismar, my personal favourite from Herbert Bayer…the list goes on…Chermayeff, Glaser, Bass.
I stumbled across The Salvage Press the other day. Lovely work…
The Salvage Press is devoted to preserving, promoting and pursuing excellence in design, typography & letterpress printing. It is the name under which artist & designer Jamie Murphy produces his letterpress printed books and broadsides.
Take a look. Or follow them here and/or here.
Now these are lovely. Beautiful colours and great use of near-silhouettes.
Sorry. I can't remember what these are for. Nature or seasons or something. Who knows.
Update:
Special thanks to Aleks in NL for addressing my ignorance. He says, "These are the Dutch 'Kinderpostzegels' from 1971. The designs (earth, water, air, sun and moon) are made by Babs van Wely." And sent a link to this.
The fact is space stamps, are the best stamps.
Better known for having lots of cash, the Alpine-bordered principality isn't a country you'd think had produced many beautiful stamps. You'd be right. It hasn't. Except for these.
Apologies. That title is most likely shocking French. I do, after all, "Speak French like crap". Or so I was told (as you may already know) quite fairly, by a barman in Paris. He offered me a hard boiled egg. Which I politely turned down. Oeuf.
(I've got a stamp thing going on at the moment. Lots more to come).
Say what you like about the former Soviet Union. Whatever you think of Stalin's "socialist island", the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany, their invasion of eastern Poland and occupation of the Baltic countries; regardless of how you feel about the annexations in the Estonian and Latvian Republics, the attempted invasion of Finland or the 1940 Ultimatum in Bukovina and the Hertz region of Romania; the later, so called, puppet regimes in Eastern and Central Europe, the Red Army looting of Hungary, the Berlin blockade, Tito-Stalin Split and what-not and so-forth; you can't devy, they didn't half make some lovely stamps.
Well known for it's oblique graphic angles The Netherlands have produced some excellent stampages. Like everywhere else, it's not the norm - nowhere, and I really mean nowhere has a consistently high standard to philatelic design, which makes the standout examples all the more prized.
Found Swissness.
Found in Birmingham. Actually, from France.
It's just a snippet of good old fashioned foundness. Unearthed in Birmingham during our trip to the mainland at Easter.
It's, I think, a little known fact that while a near legendary type designer, artist and pervert, Eric Gill was a woeful failure as a stamp designer. It's not that he didn't try. He tried quite a few times. Was invited to try on a number of occasions. But for some reason, his attempts at philatelic composition were met with rejection, rejection, rejection.
His stroppy attitude probably didn't help. Not one to hide his opinions, Eric made sure the powers that be knew his feelings on the subject. Them being that the humble, utilitarian postage stamp was just that, and no more. That it should be free from ornamentation, whimsy and sentimentality. And that anyone who felt otherwise, like the fiddly-fingered stamp collectors, were horribly misguided in both their thoughts on the matter and their chosen leisure-time pursuit.
Hardly surprising then that the decision makers at HM Post Office booted out the cantankerous old beard's designs, time after time. In fact, I suspect they had a right laugh doing it. Of course, Gill has unlucky too. His Edward VIII coronation issues were all ready to roll when the idiot king dropped his crown in favour of that floozy Simpson. In 1940 Gill drew the British crown for inclusion on a special Anglo-French issue only to have the work well and truly buggered by the Nazis when they forced France to surrender making the stamp design somewhat inappropriate. And then there was that confounded fool Harold Nelson. Obviously the PO's favourite his designs were forever pipping EG to the post.
Michael Russem at the Kat Ran Press, in Cambridge Massachusetts, very kindly sent me the booklet they've published on the subject, along with a postcard and a stamp that featured, in the end, a bit of Gill's lettering. Which is how I know this stuff now. Short but well illustrated, I really enjoyed the booklet, it's even laugh out loud funny at times. Included is Gill's own "Notes on Postage Stamps with Reference to a Lecture of Mr B Guy Harrison" from the Eric Gill Archive at the Clark Memorial Library at UCLA. Which is how you get such a good insight into the great man's crotchety mind.
You can get hold of your own copy here.
I recently stumbled across this set of Child Welfare stamps from 1931, immediately recognising them as the work of Piet Zwart. I was wrong, they're actually by his mate, the lesser known Gerard Kiljan but date from around the period Zwart did loads of work for the Dutch Post Office so the mistake was fair enough I think. And they're certainly Zwart-ish. Along with their other mate, Paul Schuitema, the three constitute a kind of New Typography super-group.
I'm not going to do this because it just sounds too corny but I had an idea a while back to run a series called "Philatelous Fogg: Around the world in 80 stamps". Perhaps it would have been good. But I'm not going to do it. Instead, I'm going to stick to random posts about postal paraphernalia, like this set commemorating Canada's World Exposition in 1986. Interestingly, there's an online Expo Museum, full of broken links unfortunately but with a little perseverance a search can prove fruitful. I found this website dedicated to Lucien De Roeck, who designed the identity for Expo 58 in Brussels.
