The Main Library exhibits a calligrapher’s elegant envelopes to himself

Mailing a letter or postcard to oneself to collect the canceled stamp and postmark is not that unusual, but no one else has taken it to the extreme of Alan A. Blackman, 1125 Shrader St., San Francisco, CA 94117.

Blackman is a professional calligrapher, and once a month for 36 years, his self-addressed envelopes arrived, as elegant as wedding invitations. Which was not perfect enough for Blackman, who started turning his name and address into site-specific artworks so intricate that it is a wonder any postal worker took the time to decipher them.

But amazingly, they have all reached him, and now the evidence of this obscure and lonely hobby is on display at the San Francisco Public Library.

The show is called: «Letters to Myself,» but there are no letters here. Blackman is eccentric but not that eccentric. He is interested in envelopes, not the contents of envelopes. There are more than 200 on display, and most are a calligrapher’s tribute to the place they were being sent from.

«These envelopes bear very colorful stamps from the U.S. and elsewhere in the world, and they are all addressed to the same person in somewhat curious handwriting, and that person is myself,» says Blackman, an elfin man who carries himself like David Suchet as Hercule Poirot and speaks in English that is as perfect as his handwriting.

Traveling by mail

«Letters to Myself» comes from everywhere, though Blackman has not been anywhere in pursuit of this project. He lives in the world of stamp collectors and did his traveling by mail.

He studied catalogs, and when a commemorative stamp was about to be issued, he mailed a self-addressed but unstamped letter to the postmaster of the city where the stamp was originating. On the day the new stamp was issued, the postmaster would affix the new postage stamp to the envelope along with an ink stamp that read «first day of issue.»

«When I decided to embark on this activity, you have to know the reason why, I would assume,» he says. «There are three components.»

The first component was that he grew up in rural New York during the FDR era and took up the president’s hobby of stamp collecting as an act of patriotism. The second component is that after moving west, Blackman had an «acrimonious» breakup with his wife and wanted to interest his 11-year old son in stamp collecting as a form of bonding.

«I’m trying to think of the third component,» says Blackman, who can also not recall exactly how old he is. But he knows the year of his birth, 1928.

«I remembered back to my childhood stamp-collecting days how thrilling it was to receive my own individual mail addressed to me,» he says, «and I thought maybe I could produce this effect on my own son, where he would get something unexpected and hopefully enjoy it, and he did.»

The Main Library exhibits a calligrapher’s elegant envelopes to himself

Source: www.sfgate.com