A Very Special Postal Art Project
For 36 years, Alan Blackman mailed letters to himself and matched his handwriting on the envelopes to the visual themes of the stamps, with amazing results.
Last month I wrote about a great piece of mail that I received from an IC reader. That prompted a comment from another reader, named Matt Douma, who wrote:
[This] reminds me of a show I saw at the San Francisco Public Library years ago of postcards and letters that a stamp collector mailed to himself, with his name and address hand-lettered to reflect the design of the stamps. I stumbled across it by accident, and it was one of the best displays of art I've ever seen. I highly recommend this video about the project.
The video is about 10 minutes long, and it took me a few days before I got around to watching it. But once I did, I was completely blown away, just as Matt was. After digging a bit deeper and learning more, I’m not so sure I’d go so far as to call it one of the best displays of art I’ve ever seen, but it’s definitely one of the best long-term art projects I’ve ever seen.
Here’s the story: In 1968, a guy in San Francisco named Alan Blackman began mailing letters to himself, a habit he maintained for 36 years. These were all first-day covers, meaning that he mailed the letters using stamps that had just been released that day, so the stamps received a special “First Day of Issue” cancellation mark. (More on this in a minute.) Blackman was a calligrapher, and at some point he began matching the lettering style of his name and address on the envelopes to the visual style and/or thematic content of the stamps. For example, when a new Uncle Sam stamp was issued in 1998, Blackman styled his address like a flag-themed top hat (as seen in the photo at the top of this page).
Sometimes Blackman’s lettering designs depicted figures or characters, as in the case of the address accompanying these 1997 Bug Bunny stamps:
Since Blackman mailed these letters to himself, he was able to maintain a collection of all the designs. In 2015, the San Francisco Public Library hosted an exhibit featuring some of his most notable envelopes. That show, called “Letters to Myself: The Calligraphic First Day Covers of Alan A. Blackman,” is the one that reader Matt Douma was referring to in his recent comment, and the video that Matt linked to is an overview of the exhibit. Here are some screen shots from that video, showing the depth and breadth of Blackman’s front-of-the-envelope creativity:
