18. EXPEDITION TRAINING & PHILATELIC COVERS

IN THE TRADITIONS OF POLAR PHILATELY

Over the past year as I’ve conducted training and research projects on Kelleys Island, I’ve begun producing a series of philatelic covers to commemorate the work.

A “cover” is an envelope (in other words, a letter cover) that becomes collectible because of design features, historical significance, or usage characteristics. There is a rich tradition of using covers to commemorate and communicate about expeditions in polar philatelic history, and I want my endeavors to contribute to this history, so I’ve been researching covers and have begun mailing covers from my expedition training trips.

Some of these commemorative covers are available for purchase in my shop, and I’ll be presenting various covers I’ve designed at the American Philatelic Society’s convention on Saturday, August 12, at a table in the Cachetmakers Bourse at the Great American Stamp Show in Cleveland. A copy of these covers also belongs to my expedition archive at the Nevada Museum of Art.

I want to talk today about the design process and mention some of the observations I made about the contemporary postal handling of philatelic mail. At some point, I’ll produce a more formal analysis, and I’ve already produced a 220-page document outlining the traces of postal handling on each cover, as well as a taxonomy of auxiliary markings and USPS processing mistakes, but today I’m just introducing these covers and mentioning briefly the types of damage they’ve received.

Here’s an example of a cover I designed and mailed in June:

A description of the project was offset printed on the back of the cover, and the remaining markings were produced with ink stamps that I designed for each aspect of the training expeditions that I wanted to commemorate. I’ll write about those projects another time, but I want to mention the postage stamps and the postmarks first.

The covers I like best are the ones where stamps are thematically related to the project that the cover commemorates, so for me, I needed the stamps to relate to my project. Finding Great Lakes topical stamps that looked good with my design was a challenge, but I was able to find two topical stamps that I think do the trick. The first design feature the Saint Lawrence Seaway (Scott #2091) which connects the Great Lakes to the Atlantic, and the second design features a blocky mountain scene in honor of Canada (Scott #1324) which relates to my project since I’m training for an expedition that will take place in Northern Canada. It might seem trivial, but I also took care in placing them on the envelope in a way that geographically reflects the latitude arrangement of Canada (placed at top), and the Great Lakes (placed at bottom). I’ve used Scott #2091 on the postcard correspondence that I mail to my subscribers, and at some point I want to talk about this stamp a little more, but not today.

I had originally intended to wet the stamps and flap with water from Lake Erie, but the gum was running and the flaps wouldn’t dry flat, so I ended up resorting to an acid-free glue stick to keep everything in place.

I had a couple of options in how I would handle the mailing of these covers: I could leave them stamped but unmailed, I could stamp them and have them postmarked for hand-back mail, or I could stamp them and mail them from the post office on Kelleys Island and see what happened to the covers during mail delivery. It was a risk, but I mailed them to myself on the island. Since Kelleys Island is a small post office, all mail leaves the island for Area Mail Processing before returning to the island. Previously, this mail would have stayed in Ohio in the western basin at the Toledo Processing & Distribution Center (P&DC) which now takes place at the 900,000 square-foot Metroplex Michigan P&DC in Pontiac, Michigan — of noted fame as the busiest postal facility in the United States.

All mail that I send and receive goes through Metroplex and along with 30,000 other mail pieces each hour, zips through one of their Advanced Facer-Canceller System (AFCS) machines and has a facer cancel applied to the mailpiece marking it with the Metroplex Michigan designation.

MISTAKES WERE MADE

When I received all of my 101 covers back in the mail, I was frustrated at the damage and excessive markings that destroyed these covers. Most of the mailpieces I collect are in pristine condition, but these came back looking kind of sad. But the longer I looked at the mail, the more I recognized patterns of handling treatment that made me wonder what the hell happened when my envelopes entered the facility.

When I look at the collection as a whole, it is clear to me that the person who processed these covers at Metroplex in Michigan was having a very bad day. As I mentioned, I've built a taxonomy of how these covers were processed and there are at least 32 types of handling in this collection, along with excessive marking, folding, and damage to both the stamps and covers. After I finished cataloging the auxiliary markings and cover condition characteristics, I began thinking of this edition as a corpus of data on the mail system. As individual objects they’re a commemoration of my expedition training, but as a whole collection, they’re also an index of how Area Mail processing centers impact the lifecycle of bulk mailing of items of philatelic interest.

Simple tools from discourse analysis make it easy to identify the batch processing mistakes in the narrative these covers tell. You don’t have to be a careful reader to tell that these were mishandled, but as I was figuring out each step in the processing which resulted in the damage, I found myself drawing on habits I’ve carried over from my days in anthropology and linguistics. There is a good story here, and I’m thinking through how I want to tell it.

In the meantime, I’ll close with a reading from Chapter 2 of the Postal Operations Manual (POM) which describes the handling of philatelic mail, including explicit directions for employees to exercise care to prevent damage, and to avoid over-canceling covers to preserve attractiveness, and to keep the covers from being mutilated in the mail-stream:

231.35 Philatelic Covers

Employees should exercise care in handling all philatelic covers to ensure that they are not damaged in mail handling. These covers are generally identifiable by a design (cachet) on the left side of the envelope.

231.36 Defacing Philatelic Covers

Postal Service employees should ensure that philatelic covers are not over-canceled; back-stamped, marked "received this date," or otherwise defaced on front or back; used as a top piece in a bundle for destination-package labeling purposes; or bent, folded, mutilated, or damaged by rubber bands.

Take a look at a couple of covers I received from Metroplex, Michigan P&DC.

Here is cover #022:

Note: While I consider the placement of paper tape in the top left quadrant of this cover to be a misplacement, I don’t have it circled in red in the thumbnails below, but it is marked in the analysis tables. I also have the upside down orientation and placement of the facer cancel marked in the tables, but not circled in red. I’ve used red circles to make it easy to see the errors and damage where it might be less obvious.

Here is cover #074 which sustained gross folding, as well as orientation mistakes through the IMb barcode sprayer & the AFCS:

All of this damage, while disheartening for me as an artist, is incredibly fascinating for me as an anthropologist because it’s a clear index of system errors in human-machine interaction.

At one point it seems like a human noticed how badly this mail was being processed, and it appears that they recognized this was philatelic material they were mutilating and attempted to intervene, but they failed at that too. A few covers from this edition do not have any damage at all, and only four (4) covers have a hand cancel from Metroplex instead of the AFCS markings for the AMP metered cancel. But even these hand cancels are excessive and sloppy, and made a mess on the backs of other covers as the cancels transferred wet ink in the sorting process. Here’s an example:

I’m still processing this data and I’ve begun talking to people who know more about this than I do, so there is probably more to come in this story. In the meantime, beginning Sunday, August 13, you’ll be able to purchase some of my other field project covers in my shop.