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Darlene Altschul of Southern California couldn't quite
fit all of this familiar Tarzan cartoon from Gary Larson's The Far Side
on the front, so she continued it on the back. I'm showing both sides of
the cover she mailed my way on Aug. 18, 2003, with a Purple Heart stamp
and a purple raptor stamp of her own design. The cover has a machine cancel
of Aug. 18 but somehow also got a hand cancel of Aug. 1! The letter inside
is dated Aug. 16. I'll also throw in a Superman cover made by the trivia-loving
Cover Monster of Ohio and postmarked Aug. 18, 2011.
I don't know why it took three men
to get him out of his costume unless one had to undrape the cape, one had
to unbuckle the bullet- and brick-proof vest, and one had to make sure
the springs in his boots didn't sproing.
It looks as if this cover may have gotten run over by
a speeding freight train.
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Jim Norris of Sidney, Ohio, printed Johnny and Maureen
onto this envelope, added a jungle green border, and mailed it to me on
Aug. 19, 2010.
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Paul Gerwitz, New York, member #341 of the Art Cover
Exchange, put this thoughtful fellow on an Aug. 20, 1999, cover to muse:
"I wonder how Tarzan always found vines of the right length and in the
right place in order to go from place to place?"
A lot of fans of ERB books have also wondered how the
movie Tarzan managed to do that!
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Many ERB fans devote all or a part
of their vacation to ERB pursuits. In 2015, I couldn't afford to travel
to Africa to visit the estate of Lord Greystoke, so instead I went to a
gathering of the Northern California Mangani, which has since been renamed
the North Coast Mangani to accommodate those of us who dwell in the forests
closer to the Arctic Circle. Actually, the Arctic Circle in Centralia,
Washington, closed a few years ago and the building is now used by a Teriyaki
joint.
I mailed out these covers to some fellow members of the
Art Cover Exchange on Aug. 22, 2015, and sent one to myself as well. The
cover image is an actual photograph of some of the Mangani assembling prior
to a Dum Dum dance.
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Even with a large, No. 10 envelope,
the Greystoke poster wouldn't quite fit, so The Cover Monster simply turned
it sideways for this cover, mailed with a Year of the Manu stamp on Aug.
28, 2005, from Cleveland, Ohio.
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The awesome Tyrannosaurus Rex not only
terrorized other living creatures, but it also showed up to harass the
heroes and heroines of Edgar Rice Burroughs books, and the appearances
of those blood-spillers spilled over to the comic book versions as well.
When the Postal Service issued four Tyrannosaurus Rex
stamps on Aug. 29, 2019, I used all four for some first-day covers with
a local postmark. That one was canceled with a postmark with red ink, which
appears to have seeped out a bit over the past year, thus adding some blood-like
splatter to the creatures, not unlike what they may have had on their bodies
after a delicious meal.
After making my locally canceled cover, I spent some time
creating some cover designs for the individual stamps. Four of the designs
featured book covers from adventures of Tarzan and others in Pellucidar,
the land of terror at the Earth's core, and from the saga of Caspak in
The Land That Time Forgot. I sent these in for the distinctive official
first-day pictorial cancellation.
The last cover design is one of my grandson, Schuyler
White, taken on a guy trip to Montana and other northwest locales in August
of 2017. This one has Schuyler next to one of the Tyrannosaurus Rex skeletons
at the Museum of the Rockies on the Montana State University campus in
Bozeman. That isn't the only trip I've taken with Schuyler. He rode the
Coast Starlight with me to the Dum Dum in August, 2012, when the Edgar
Rice Burroughs stamp was issued. His biggest thrill there was meeting Denny
Miller and he talked to Denny a couple of times on the telephone in months
following.
More Tyrannosaurus Rex covers by me and others:
https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=3244590198970510&id=100002586849510
Imagining ERB on a guy trip (dinosaurs, cave bears, the
7th Cavalry, and more):
https://www.erbzine.com/mag60/6011.html
