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102
John Colasanti, the_purveyor_of_needful_things on ebay, put
yours truly between Johnny and Ed for this one-of-a-kinder, mailed Dec.
6, 2016, three years ago today. John makes lots of cachets for new stamps
and made several designs for the ERB stamp issued in 2012 as well.
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103
I made a trip to the Post Office this morning to get a Dec.
7 postmark on some covers I made up to honor Edgar Rice Burroughs. After
the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, he could have rested easy in Hawaii
while the younger ones went to fight the war. But instead his response
was, "How can I help?"
He wrote a "Laugh It Off" column for Honolulu newspapers
for a couple of months to help boost people's morale, and became active
with the Businessmen's Military Training Corps, made up of citizens who
trained in case the Japanese launched a followup ground attack on Hawaii.
Finally, he found his calling as a war correspondent, the oldest to don
the correspondent's uniform in the Pacific Theater.
And all of this in his mid-60s when most folks are drawing
their first Social Security check.
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104
Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, and a Tarzan, and
a talking ape. The Cover Monster dropped this cover in the mailbox on the
first day of winter, Dec. 21, 2017.
Postage was a 37-cent Santa Claus ornament stamp issued
in 2004 and a 15-cent Christmas rocking horse stamp issued in 1978.
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105
On the last day of the year, in 2018, Uwe Youssoupoff franked
an Edgar Rice Burroughs stamp with a Mailer's Postmark Permit canellation
from Tampa, Florida, and dropped it in the mail to me. This is a hand-painted
scene, with the presence of a note from Jane to Tarzan.
In addition to the postmark, Uwe used a small rubber stamp
image across the bottom of the stamp. I could have sworn it was a cartoony
drawing of a tyrannosaurus until I looked at the back of the envelope,
where he had used it also, and it was obviously a braying donkey. It's
fun to see how parts of an overlaid image can be lost in the stamp's design
so that the image appears to be something else entirely! I never knew the
donkey was such a close relative of the tyrannosaurus.
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106
Post offices are closed on New Years Day but that doesn't
stop cover makers such as Charlie Delgado, of Elyria, Ohio, who is authorized
to postmark his own mail with a Mailer's Postmark Permit.
Charlie postmarked this cover Jan. 1, 2017, featuring
his illustration of a January calendar featuring his favorite Tarzans,
along with some images from a Funky Winkerbean comic strip by Tom Batiuk,
celebrating the Tarzan Books for Boys and Girls editions of the 1950s.
PUSHING THE ENVELOPE NO.
107
Many ERB fans have designed and printed their own special
envelopes for corresponding with fellow fans. This one was the work of
the late Tony Menegazzo, who drew his own Tarzan-Ape image and used it
on his mail for many years, this one having been postmarked Jan. 2, 2015.
Tony passed away at age 90 on Nov. 1, 2018.
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108
For John Carter, Rats were the Pits!
The rat is an animal that most people would not want
to have in or around their homes. They can carry diseases, they can gnaw
away at the foundation of your house with their sharp teeth, they're clever,
and they're not easily intimidated.
This is the Year of the Rat in the Chinese Lunar New Year
Calendar. What most residents of Earth do not realize is that the inhabitants
of Barsoom -- the planet most Earthlings know as Mars -- also operates
on a beastly cycle and this year is, for them, also the Year of the Rat,
or Ulsio, as the counterpart to Earth's creature is known there.
It is not unlike its version on this planet, having the
same basic instincts for inflicting mayhem on other creatures which get
in its way. However, it is larger and thus equipped with bigger teeth and
has six legs on which to make its assaults.
Despite their unsavory reputation, Earthly rats tend to
be timid unless backed into a corner. Martian rats, however, are extremely
aggressive.
Earthman John Carter encountered the Ulsio in beastly
form on several occasions and also, memorably, had to deal with a human
named Rapas the Ulsio, who was so-named for his furtive and destructive
nature. Carter encounters him in "Swords of Mars."
One memorable Ulsio attack occurred in "Llana of Gathol,"
when Carter and comrade in arms, Pan Dan Chee, were placed into the pits
beneath the city of Horz. Burroughs's son, John Coleman Burroughs, painted
the scene as Carter described, capturing the fury of the attacking beast
as best he could. His illustration appears on a cover that I made the other
day. I went to the Galvin Post Office this morning and purchased some of
the stamps and then had them canceled with today's date of Jan. 11, the
first day the Chinese Lunar New Year stamps for 2020 were available for
sale.
Here, from Chapter 4 of the Gathol volume, is Carter's
first-person narration of that encounter, passed on to Burroughs, starting
when he was “…interrupted by the sound of shuffling feet behind me. I wheeled;
and, instinctively, my hand flew to where the hilt of a sword should have
been but was not. Facing me, and ready to spring upon me, was the largest
ulsio I had ever seen.
"These Martian rats are fierce and unlovely things. They
are many legged and hairless, their hide resembling that of a new-born
mouse in repulsiveness. Their eyes are small and close set and almost hidden
in deep, fleshy apertures. Their most ferocious and repulsive features,
however, are their jaws, the entire bony structure of which protrudes several
inches beyond the flesh, revealing five sharp, spadelike teeth in each
jaw, the whole suggesting the appearance of a rotting face from which much
of the flesh has sloughed away. Ordinarily they are about the size of an
Airedale terrier, but the thing that leaped for me in the pits of Horz
that day was as large as a small puma and ten times as ferocious.
"As the creature leaped for my throat, I struck it a heavy
blow on the side of its head and knocked it to one side; but it was up
at once and at me again; then Pan Dan Chee came into the scene. They had
not disarmed him, and with his short-sword he set upon the ulsio.
"It was quite a battle. That ulsio was the most ferocious
and most determined beast I had ever seen, and it gave Pan Dan Chee the
fight of his life. He had knocked off two of its six legs, an ear, and
most of its teeth before the ferocity of its repeated attacks abated at
all. It was almost cut to ribbons, yet it always forced the fighting. I
could only stand and look on, which is not such a part in a fight as I
like to take. At last, however, it was over; the ulsio was dead, and Pan
Dan Chee looked at me and smiled.”
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109
This cover fits into the "postal history" collecting category
-- ordinary mail entered into the ordinary mailstream.
This one is extra nice, though, because it comes from
an address in Tarzan, Texas, and has a nice Tarzan, TX, postmark. It was
entered into the mailstream on Jan. 12, 1989, 31 years ago today. A "Received"
stamp on the back shows that it arrived at its destination in San Angelo
the following day.
More about Postal History:
https://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/an-interview-with-postal-history-collector-richard-frajola/
PUSHING THE ENVELOPE NO.
110
Tarzan is more well-known worldwide than The Phantom
in countless ways and for countless reasons but "Mr. Walker"
still is quite popular and has beaten Tarzan in at least one
category: His daily and Sunday newspaper comic strip is still
active, now written by Tony DePaul and drawn by Mike Manley since
its creator, Lee Falk, has passed away.
This cover was postmarked in 2016 on the
80th anniversary of The Phantom and four years later the masked
jungle "ghost" is still going strong.
The Phantom strip daily and Sunday, vintage and
current, is available at www.comicskingdom.com.
PUSHING THE ENVELOPE No.
111
The fact that "apes" rhymes with "grapes" has been noted
by many and thus the fruit has sometimes been connected with Tarzan of
the Apes, who probably ate his share, since grapes are major crops in some
parts of Africa.
Gene Wolfe wrote a short story, "Tarzan of the Grapes,"
which is in "Mother Was a Lovely Beast," a feral man anthology edited by
Philip Jose Farmer. That anthology also includes "An Extract from the Memoirs
of Lord Greystoke" by Farmer, as well as his introduction. In addition,
ERB's short story "The God of Tarzan," from "Jungle Tales of Tarzan," is
also included.
This postal cover is one of 10 made by philatelic hobbyist
Dennis Gelvin of Olympia when the USPS issued a Pinot Noir Grapes 5-cent
stamp on Feb. 19, 2016. He added a Summer Harvest "Sweet Corn" Forever
stamp to pay for the Postal Service to carry it through the mailstream.
PUSHING THE ENVELOPE NO.
112
Histah the snake is likely to get the worst of this deal
when Tarzan swings out to grab onto a vine, as imagined by Uwe Youssoupoff
of Tampa, Florida. Uwe used his Mailer's Postmark Permit one year ago on
Feb. 25 to cancel the Edgar Rice Burroughs stamp on his hand-painted cover.
He mailed it to me in a larger envelope so it would escape any extra postal
markings.
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113
Trees and ferns of the type which fed the dinosaurs on
Earth's outer crust are in abundance in Pellucidar, according to the seven
true-life accounts Edgar Rice Burroughs chronicled about the world inside
the earth. And where ferns thrive, so do dinosaurs -- especially the vegetarian
dinosaurs. In "At the Earth's Core," David Innes noted, "Behind us rose
a dark and forbidding wood of giant arborescent ferns intermingled with
the commoner types of a primeval tropical forest...." (Chapter II) In Chapter
III of "Tanar of Pellucidar," as Tanar and Stellara were being taken to
the village on the island of Amiocap, we read: “It is all just as I have
dreamed it so many times,” said the girl, with a happy sigh. “I have always
known that some day I should come to Amiocap and that it would be just
as my mother told me that it was—the great trees, the giant ferns, the
gorgeous, flowering vines and bushes." She noted that Amiocap had fewer
savage beasts, which would likely have been because the less-savage dinosaurs
who dined on ferns would have been more likely to thrive there. When the
USPS issued five different fern stamps on March 6, 2014, Dave Curtis, free-lance
artist as well as postal cover designer, thought of the idea of making
cachets with the types of dinosaurs who dined on such plants. Yes, there
were also meat-eaters in Pellucidar, but there were certainly plenty of
ferns as well to feed the herbivores. Dave makes his covers by carving
images on rubber blocks. To make multi-colored images, he has to do a lot
of planning and thinking. He prints the covers in one color to start with
and then carves away key spots on the rubber block for printing in another
color, and so on, until he's done.
