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The Cover Monster of Elyria, Ohio, printed a Disney Tarzan
image onto this two-cent pre-stamped envelope and added a 42-cent stamp
to make up the rest of the postage needed and mailed it to me on July 16,
2009. The cancellation ended up on the back side. The Monster's neighbor,
Charlie Delgado, used the Bob Hope stamp and part of the selvage from the
stamp sheet on this collage cover showing movie posters. "Flash Gordon"
got the center spread but "The Revenge of Tarzan" poster made it onto the
display of adventure movie ads. Charlie remembered Bomba, the Jungle Boy,
too, and used a couple of art images from an auction catalog on this cover,
also mailed July 16, 2009. Once again, the Bob Hope stamp was featured.
If Hope had still been around and had seen these covers,
he might have commented, "Call me Bwana!" His co-star, Anita Ekberg, would
have been an interesting Jane.
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This is an add-on cover. I added on
a little bit about ERB's "The Lost Continent," originally published under
the title of "Beyond Thirty," to tie in with this old Victory cover postmarked
in Tarzana on July 17, 1944. The story was originally published in 1916
but this ACE Frazetta cover for Ace Books didn't show up until October
1963, so the cover is a bit anachronistic in that sense. But, it's all
in fun!
And those who have read this book know the meaning of
ERB's "Victory."
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Every ERB fan knows Geronimo's real
name was Go-yat-thlay but much of the world doesn't. The Cover Monster
knew it, though, and put together this cachet featuring the Apache who
is a character in ERB's "The War Chief. "
The Monster used two 25-cent stamps for postage, one with
a Comanche warbonnet, which would probably be a good stamp to use on a
cover tied in with ERB's "Deputy Sheriff of Comanche County." The other
stamp is John Wayne from the movie "Stagecoach," in which the stage on
which he was a passenger had to fight off Indians in Apache territory.
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These look more like monkeys and chimpanzees
than Edgar Rice Burroughs's Mangani but the late Doc Nichol, Tigard, Oregon,
dentist and philatelist, may have been inventing a new species since, in
this case, he uses an acronym for his APES (the Antique Postage and Epicurean
Society.) It's also known as the Munch and Crunch for Lunch Bunch. There's
a reason Doc often used his own, homemade postmark which identifies His
mail as coming from "Bull Mountain." This one also got a couple of regular
Tigard postmarks of July 27, 2005
The cover says that date was the last meeting of the APES.
Might have been their first, as well.
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The first of every August is
the Great ACE Day, which doesn't mean much to anyone who isn't a member
of the Art Cover Exchange, a philatelic organization I joined back in the
mid-90s. On the "Great ACE Day," or GAD for short, members send as many
postal covers as possible to a selected member, in order to inundate him
or her (as well as the letter carrier) in covers. In hte past few years,
the "Target" of GAD has received about 1,000 pieces of mail over the first
few days in August. In addition, members usually send at least one cover
to all of the other members.
I myself was the Target in 2004 and
received a lot of ERB-releated covers, and I regularly get ERB-Tarzan covers
from other members in other GAD events as well as year-round.
Here's a selection of such covers:
--Dave Curtis, Virginia, carves images on blocks
to print his covers. For GAD 2004 he made this monkey, since that was the
year I was the Target, and added a fellow and his girl swinging on a vine
to try to escape from the barrage of covers being fired by a vintage fighter
plane.
--Dave Lemon, Ohio, found a picture of some Disney
Tarzan nesting dolls and put them on a cover for me to see. He also made
one featuring Tarzan's Army and added a stamp from an Endangered Species
sheet showing the Florida panther.
--Dennis Gelvin, Olympia, found a Tarzan-related
cartoon to adorn his cover.
--Charlie Delgado, Ohio, was looking forward to
the issue of the ERB stamp in 2012 about as much as I was, and used an
image cut from promotional material to make this cover.
--The Cover Monster of Ohio sent a cover with
a "New Adventures of Tarzan Poster," franked by an Edmontonia stamp, and
a cover highlighting the Tarzan newspaper comic strip with a Parasaurolophus
stamp, both from the "World of Dinosaurs" stamp sheet of 1997.
Bill Hillman collects these "Pushing
the Envelope" posts and features them at ERBzine. To see covers from
Aug. 1 I shared last year, as well as many others, go to:
https://www.erbzine.com/mag67/6725c.html
To learn more about the Art
Cover Exchange:
