PUSHING THE ENVELOPE NO.
226
Tarzan takes down a tiger in this postal cover made by
Robin Sparrow in New Zealand and mailed with stamps picturing scenery from
the great outdoors. Over the years, the ape man had to deal with big cats
like lions and leopards but eventually had some encounters with tigers
toward the end of the canon.
This art appears to be from a British Tarzan Annual or
similar book. The 343 designation on the cover is my membership number
in the Art Cover Exchange, a club whose members send each other mail art.
For more information, see: artcoverexchange.org
More ERB covers in the Pushing the Envelope series plus
other ERB-related stamp articles:
https://www.erbzine.com/martin/#stamps
PUSHING THE ENVELOPE NO.
227
Imagine going into Walmart and finding shelves filled
with products you didn't know existed and brand names of which you've never
heard. But you knew that if you looked long enough and hard enough you
might eventually find what you sought.
That's the way I sometimes feel when browsing around at
a philatelic show, with dozens of dealers offering postage stamps and other
postal collectibles from countries you didn't know existed. In all that
mass of material, how do you zero in on exactly what you want -- if it
even exists among all the boxes full of stamps and postal covers?
It was something like that for me at the Great American
Stamp Show in Illinois in August 2021, when the American Philatelic Society,
the American First Day Cover Society and the American Topical Association
teamed up to host the huge get-together. The U.S. Postal Service was there
as well, offering first-day cancellations for its latest stamps.
I bought some of the new stamps (celebrating Backyard
Games) and obtained first-day cancellations, and bought some covers from
the AFDCS booths but had no idea where to start looking for other things
among the many dealers.
Finally I noticed one man who had several tables filled
with plastic tubs full of covers, too many to look carefully through all
of them. So, I chose one box, found a chair, and started going through
it. About halfway through, I saw a cover with exactly what I was looking
for -- an Edgar Rice Burroughs stamp! It had been added to a cover with
other stamps and neither those nor nothing else on the cover seemed at
first to have much to do with ERB, but I set it aside anyway. Then, I spotted
another cover -- and another and another. Some of them had more obvious
ERB themes. In all, there were about eight of these covers, all different
but all apparently done by the same cachet maker. I grabbed all of them
and paid the dealer a buck each for them.
Closer inspection showed me that the ERB stamp on each
cover had been canceled in a unique way. Each had a series of perforations
arranged in the shape of the initials "H.N." This, I soon learned, was
the mark which identified these covers as the work of man named Hideaki
Nakano, who produced a large range of different cover designs, starting
in 1980, with many themes, including humorous, bizarre, photos, protest,
political commentary and more.
He used a variety of cover-making methods throughout his
career but in the latter part he went to using large envelopes, some with
many stamps and cancels from all countries. The ERB stamps he made use
of were issued in 2012 and so that stamp had to have been added to these
covers, and the perforations used, in that era.
Foster Miller, director and chair of the Membership Committee
of the AFDCS, recalled that "Hideaki Nakano was one of the more interesting
characters in cachet making."
Hideaki Nakano's first cachet were for the 1980 Coral
Reef and the 1981 stamp honoring Illinois senator Everett Dirksen. "He
advertised his covers as the only true cachets, the only cachets of value,
and better than everyone else's," said Miller. "Nakano did his Super Cachets
(many times on oversize envelopes) for over 1,000 issues from 1981 until
shortly before his death. On his first day covers, the new stamp almost
always had his HN perfin."
Nakano was born March 23, 1935, in Detroit.
"I've seen a reference that his father emigrated from
Japan and lived in New York State," said Miller. He regularly traveled
to stamp shows with his sister, who may have been a retired college professor.
The philatelic community learned of his death in 2019 from a Detroit area
stamp dealer, when a post card advertising a local stamp bourse was returned
to sender marked "deceased." Nakano lived in a seventh story apartment
and had multiple storage units full of covers.
So how did the ERB covers make the trip from his apartment
to my ERB cover collection?
Miller said that in September 2019, an anonymous Detroit
area dealer purchased 80 large (40 gallon size) plastic tubs of Nakano's
covers from the estate. The following week, he sold all the covers to Pennsylvania
dealer Wayne Gehret (the person from whom I purchased the Nakano covers
at the Great American Stamp Show). On October 4-6, 2019, at the INDYPEX
stamp show in Noblesville, Indiana, Gehret told Mark Goodson (big first-day
cover collector from Indiana) and Miller that he had bought Nakano's stock.
"There were tens of thousands of HN Local Post first day covers that we
never knew existed. Most were one or few of a kind. Most had multiple cancels
(sometimes up to six or more), sometimes years apart. While some of the
multi-cancels took awhile to figure out (some never made sense), most showed
an amazing creativity," Miller said.
“How he kept track of the covers we don't know. We believe
that the one of a kind covers were done for his personal collection. As
far as we know, few if any of the HN Local Post covers were ever marketed.
It was only when he died that we found out about them. At INDYPEX, between
Mark Goodson and myself, we probably purchased 1,000 covers and I purchased
several hundred more at shows in October and November 2019.”
The estate then contacted Gehret, who made several trips
to Detroit and purchased the remaining contents of the storage units. "Wayne
tells me that he ended up purchasing about 200 of the plastic tubs. At
the Fairfax, Virginia, bourse later in 2021, he told me he still has at
least 75 tubs of material."
That adds up to a lot of covers. And if I found eight
ERB covers while going through a single box on Gehret's table, it could
mean there are a lot more Nakano ERB covers waiting to be found!
I suspect I'll be visiting some other stamp shows. Maybe
Gehret won't be at them, but other dealers who have purchased covers from
his huge stock might be.
Are there stamp shows in your neighborhood? Might be worthwhile
for you to go to one and find someone who has boxes full of old postal
covers for you to sift through!
More ERB covers in the Pushing the Envelope series plus
other ERB-related stamp articles:
https://www.erbzine.com/martin/#stamps
