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Presents
Volume 6725q
PUSHING THE ENVELOPE XIX
Envelope Packets 212 - 220
Including Pearl Harbor
by John Martin
My "other hobby," buying, exchanging,
making and mailing postal art covers,
ties in with my Edgar Rice Burroughs
hobby quite a bit.
I enjoy making covers featuring
Tarzan or other ERB characters,
and friends of mine have made
and mailed me such covers as well.
I thought it would be fun to
start scanning and sharing such covers
on the anniversaries of the
dates they were originally postmarked.
PUSHING THE ENVELOPE: No. 212
Laurence G Dunn mailed this cover to me postmarked July 17, 2021, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Acquanetta, who was the adversary of Johnny Weissmuller's ape man in "Tarzan and the Leopard Woman," 1946.The woman with the exotic name was born Mildred Davenport in Ozone, Wyoming, on July 17, 1921, and lived until the age of 83, passing away Aug. 16, 2004.
Laurence keeps track of some of these important dates and notes that the next centenary will be the one for Dorothy Hart, Jane in 1952's "Tarzan's Savage Fury." She was born April 4, 1922. With a stamp featuring Queen Elizabeth, the British monarch looks across the envelope at one of the barbaric queens Tarzan has encountered in the peril-fraught jungles of Africa.
Thanks, Laurence!
PUSHING THE ENVELOPE NO. 213
The US Postal Service on June 18, 2021, issued a set of 10 stamps labeled Sun Science. The sun was presented in different colors as a way of illustrating different purposes it serves.
I had thought of making 10 different Edgar Rice Burroughs-related covers but it was hard to do, since ERB didn't create a lot of worlds with a sun separate from ours. The only ones I could think of that were different were the Eternal Noonday sun of Pellucidar and the sun that is "Beyond the Farthest Star" -- Omos, around which orbits a family of 11 planets all in the same path and with breathable atmospheres connecting one to another.
The interior of ERB's moon is lit up by light from our own sun which filters in through an opening. And the worlds of Barsoom, Caspak, Tarzan's Africa, et al, all have the same sun shining over them.
So, I settled for making three ERB covers instead of 10 -- Omos, the Pellucidar sun and our familiar sun as it shines over Tarzan's Africa, where the denizens of Opar refer to it as The Flaming God.
As I looked for cover images I could use, I had a hard time finding any art at all with images of the sun of Pellucidar. There are some images that show an orb in the sky but I believe most of these are low enough that they have to be the Dead World rather than the sun. So there is a challenge for ERB artists: Depicting the sun of Pellucidar in an appropriate place.
As for my covers, I used the standard popular map of Pellucidar with an image of the sun centered atop it.
The cover representative of our sun is the Richard Powers painting for Ballantine's first printing of "Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar," showing The Flaming God in the background as Tarzan battles one of Opar's beast men.
The art for the Omos system is from erblist.com and is copyright by Bruce David "Tangor" Bozarth, website owner, and used with permission. See:
https://erblist.com/erbmania/poloda.html- - - - - But I still made my set of 10, making cachets for each cover with images of Science Fiction books that have "sun" in the title. I haven't actually read any of these other books but the titles of some are certainly intriguing, and there are more such titles that I didn't have room to use.
I also thought of using titles of other types of novels, such as Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises," but wasn't thrilled enough with that idea to do it.
I did make a few other covers, though, using a couple of Superman comic images concerning stories about the red sun of Krypton, and a couple of comics of the comic book, Sun Girl, who I'd never heard of before.- - - - - The Postal Service noted that the colors of the stamps do not represent the actual colors of the sun as perceived by human eyesight. Instead, each image is colorized by NASA according to different wavelengths that reveal or highlight specific features of the sun’s activity.
Postal Service art director Antonio Alcalá designed the stamps with digital images from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, a spacecraft launched in February 2010 to keep constant watch on the sun from geosynchronous orbit over the craft’s ground station in New Mexico.
