A Great Comfort

Pine Ridge Pet Cemetery, Dedham, Massachusetts.

Mail Art, Skate Art

If you love mail art, and I do, you must score a copy of Thrasher Mail Drop: 38 Years of Envelope Art (2019), a publication of Thrasher Magazine. Almost since the magazine’s founding in 1981, response mail began arriving. The introduction to Mail Drop notes, “Readers sent compliments, complaints, tales of skate stoke and tales of sorrow. They also began sending art. At first, some envelopes included merely expressive handwriting. Then maybe a doodle in the corner. These format tweaks mutated into edge-to-edge works of art. The humble, ordinary envelope, which had been used as the transportation vessel of the message, became an artistic canvas. Over time, the art on the envelope was the message itself.”

Brian Seber

Rocky Dean Frozen

Matt Loomis

Ben Horton

BASKEE

This large format paperback has more than 1,000 pieces of mail art/envelope art/skate art. It’s a delicious, unexpected, fascinating compendium.

Noir et Bleu

“Gangster Sketch” (2013) by Michael P. Rea of Farnham, Suffolk, UK.

Ranjoor

Illustration by Joseph Clement Coll for Hira Singh (1918) by Talbot Mundy

New York Movie

Art by Edward Hopper, 1939

Eyes

“They had great dark eyes which they used from the cool shadows of their hats in the most outrageous and innocent manner.” — From The Voice in the Rice (1910) by Gouverneur Morris, with illustrations by J.C. Leyendecker.