Envelope Developments

These collages are built into my envelope lining collection. 

I started this collection of what are also known as security seals about 35 years ago, and it currently amounts to about 1200 items. Each envelope represents the possibility of being sent elsewhere, and so I look at each of them as a tiny imaginative capsule that goes to another world.

For Envelope Developments, I conceived of destinations in terms of collage in the mode I call bibliolage. The images are temporarily attached, so each page of envelope linings can be used for another voyage, and each tiny image is free to seek an envelope (or a book) going somewhere else.

Books used:

The Real Mother Goose (1916; rpt. Rand McNally & Company, 1940)

The Illustrations of Rockwell Kent, selected by Fridolf Johnson with the collaboration of John F. H. Gorton (New York: Dover, 1976)

Women: A Pictorial Archive from Nineteenth-Century Sources, selected by Jim Harter (New York: Dover, 1978)

Dance of the Self: The Joy of Movement for Body, Mind, and Spirit by Blanche Howard (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975)

George Price's Characters: More than 200 of His Best Cartoons (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955)

The Gluyas Williams Gallery, with text by Corey Ford, Edward Streeter, Lawrence McKinney, David McCord, Robert Benchley, and Ralf Kircher (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957)

Rowlandson's Drawings for a Tour in a Post Chaise, with an introduction and notes by Robert W. Wark (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1963)

My Little Blue Story Book by Odille Ousely and David H. Russell (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1961)

The Boydell Shakespeare Prints, with an introduction by A. E. Santaniello (New York: Arno Press, 1979)

San Francisco's Golden Era: A Picture Story of San Francisco Before the Fire by Lucius Beebe and Charles Clegg (Berkeley: Howell-North, 1960)

The Italian Comedy: The Improvisation Scenarios, Lives, Attributes, Portraits, and Masks of the Illustrious Characters of the Commedia dell'Arte by Pierre Louis Duchartre, translated by Randolph T. Weaver (New York: Dover, 1966)

"Spend Some Time in the Kitchen with Your Friends," a poster by Brooke Budner for the greenhorns, n.d.