The first time I had something to write home about, I was, fittingly, at sleep-away camp. But I found myself without a postage stamp or any means of acquiring one. Somewhere between the arts-and-crafts table and the campfire, an idea came to me: I would put my camp address in the center of the envelope and use my parents’ house, where I wanted the letter delivered, as the return. I didn’t know at the time about the Dead Letter Office or its subsequent incarnations, where such stampless mail should have ended up, but my scheme somehow worked, and my parents received the letter.
Still, I learned my lesson. To this day, almost as a vestigial impulse, I am rarely without stamps. I carry sheets with me, usually loose in an overcrowded tote until a few begin to peel off their waxy backing, collecting lint at the corners. I am no philatelist, only a lay appreciator. I’m drawn to the way stamps have traveled or will travel where you will not — the way an envelope’s top-right corner illuminates the visual markings of their origins and journeys, tapping into systems that extend, in time and in space, well beyond your reach.
Throughout my first year of college in the 2000s, my long-distance boyfriend sent me weekly correspondence from art school. The mailroom staff knew me by the sculptural works I received — a foreign cigarette carton brimming with folded notes and drawings, a mounted and collaged double-exposed photograph. Those otherwise undated artworks were adorned with various stamps of a particular issue — Sugar Ray Robinson, Wilma Rudolph, Gee’s Bend quilts. When I look at them now, their stamps resurface the sunny anticipation I felt on those trips to the dormitory mailroom.
Recently, up against an application deadline, I needed a manuscript postmarked after hours. I ran to the self-service kiosk in Manhattan’s James A. Farley Post Office, with its Herodotus-inscribed entablature: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” There, a print-on-demand postage label with its digital postmark saved me. But in an age when QR codes mingle with street tags, the difference between a utilitarian stamp and a decorative one is an aesthetic chasm.
Stamps have, after all, become one of few truly national platforms for visual art. In recent years, I’ve delighted in sheets commemorating Martín Ramírez, Ruth Asawa and Ellsworth Kelly. And artful designs may have helped stamps dodge obsolescence. Over a century ago, the stamp enthusiast Walter Benjamin feared that “in a century of mechanization and technology the postage stamp does not have a very long life ahead of it.” The obituary proved premature — at least so far — and since 2007, with perhaps too much bravado, stamps have been boldly labeled “Forever.”
“Forever” didn’t exist when I was a kid. My elementary school class went on a field trip to the now-defunct Wells Fargo History Museum in downtown San Francisco, which housed a stagecoach and other relics from the company’s role in the Pony Express. I recalled those display items when, last winter, I visited the Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum. There, I learned about objects of postal lore, like the Inverted Jenny, a prized 1918 stamp featuring an iconic biplane erroneously printed upside-down. By the exit, I took six stamps from a pile to “start my collection,” and sent away for 250 more freebies as advertised on the provided envelope.
I learned only after arriving home last December with hundreds of stamps that my dad collected them as a child. For him, the highlights of his collection are postmarked German stamps from the final year of the Third Reich, given to him by his mother who lived under Nazi occupation, and which connect him to memories of her as well as to the sweep of time. In my dad’s stamp book, I saw stamps celebrating the landing of the pilgrims and “U.S. Homemakers.” A collection like his can seem like a hall of fun-house mirrors designed by a nation, reflecting and distorting past values and agendas. But stamps don’t have to remain static artifacts.
This past New Year’s Day, my niece and I sorted through miscellaneous international stamps I brought from the Postal Museum. Immediately she decided to set them in resin for use as pendants in earrings and bracelets. Recognizing their mystery, the windows they offer into faraway places and otherwise-forgotten moments, she sought out interesting pairs. For me, our sifting was an exercise in not-knowing, a 2-D dérive: What I later chose to look up was unpredictable, such as the story behind Cape Verde’s 1471 nautical chart depicting Portuguese explorers’ understanding of the African coast. As we perused this official ephemera, the world felt smaller, connected by tiny stories. The images on these rectangles gave us something we could each put our individual stamp on, whether captured in resin or not — a new lease on Forever.
Decorative stamps may not be the only way to send mail, but as mnemonic pins on the grand map of human experience, they celebrate the personal within the institutional. This spring, a student at the arts college where I teach submitted a project for critique: “Forever Stamp Forgery Kits,” replete with custom stencils to create careful, hand-drawn fakes that passed postal muster. The other students were so excited about the project that a stamped future of some kind suddenly seemed possible. Just as my grandmother had combined multiple stamps into signature designs on envelopes, a younger generation yearned to leave their mark with these small spaces. Still, I wanted to remind them, having experienced stamplessness myself, not to forget the real ones — and to appreciate them before it’s too late.
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