Erbzine.com Homepage
Official Edgar Rice Burroughs Tribute and Weekly Webzine Site
Since 1996 ~ Over 15,000 Web Pages in Archive
Presents
Volume 6725m

PUSHING THE ENVELOPE XV
Envelope Packets 164 - 180
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. 164
This Tarzan cover was put together by book creator Robin Sparrow of New Zealand and mailed on Sept. 1, 2014, the birthday of Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs.

If you can't find Tarzan in the cover design, neither can the lion. Look closely at the words above his mane.


PUSHING THE ENVELOPE NO. 165
Danny Lee made five covers like this, stating that the monthly serialization of "Tarzan at the Earth's Core" began Sept. 2, 1929, in Blue Book. The series is highly collectible because there were seven installments and Frank Hoban did a color Tarzan cover illustration for each of those issue of the magazine.

The Star-Spangled Banner stamp on the cover is canceled Sept. 2, 2015, in Corsicana, Texas. Here's a couple of other stalwart heroes who got onto covers with Sept. 2 illustrations.

The Cover Monster of Ohio put Kirk Alyn, the first to play Superman, on a cover in another adventure serial he did, playing Blackhawk. He sent it my way on Sept. 2, 2011.

Four Star Trek stamps were issued four years ago today, on Sept. 2, 2016. One of the covers I made was from a large ad for a collector plate which had commanders from four of the series. I added all four stamps for the first-day postmark.


PUSHING THE ENVELOPE NO. 166
Flea markets are a place to look for Edgar Rice Burroughs items and I've found a few things over the years while prowling the Packwood Flea Market in eastern Lewis County, Washington. I drew this vendor a few years ago and he did have some books for sale, along with some other vintage items. This was for a cover to go along with a special cancellation by the Packwood Post Office, one of several different ones made that year in communities surrounding Mt. Rainier to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Mt. Rainier National Park.

The Packwood Flea Market multiplies the population of the tiny town every Memorial Day and Labor Day. The spring event was vastly scaled down this year due to the rampaging virus. I don't know what it will be like this Labor Day weekend in Packwood.


PUSHING THE ENVELOPE NO. 167
The album cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles is well-known among ERB fans for having Johnny Weissmuller in his Tarzan persona smack dab in the middle. I clipped out a large image of this from a magazine ad and glued it onto a 6x9 envelope, then had it canceled locally on the first day of issue of the John Lennon stamp on Sept. 7, 2018.


PUSHING THE ENVELOPE NO. 168
A stamp featuring the KTM R 125 Tarzan motorcycle was issued in Austria (Osterreich) on Sept. 10, 2006. And yes, it was named for Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan. KTM is the initials of the two company founders (Ernst Kronreif and Hans Trunkenpolz), and the location of the original factory (Mattighofen, Austria) - Hence - "Kronreif, Trunkenpolz, Mattighofen."

Trunkenpolz marketed his first motorcycle in 1953, equipped with a pull-cord starter and hand-operated two-speed transmission. In 1954, he upgraded his machine to one called the R 125 Tourist, advertised as the "motorcycle for work and travel." The Tarzan model was patterned after the Grand Tourist and was coming off the assembly line in 1957 in the colors of red, black and silver. https://findyourstampsvalue.com/…/motorbikes-ktm-r-125-tarz…\



Marge Schleining of New York made a cover with tropical birds and beasts and added an Edgar Rice Burroughs stamp to send to me on Sept. 10, 2012. Marge's philatelic collection is focused on the topic of women's history. Although Jane is not on this cover, Marge wrote about Jane in the cover's insert:

WOMEN'S HISTORY AND TARZAN
The fictitious Jane Porter (later Jane Clayton) is a major character in Edgar Rice Burroughs's series of Tarzan novels, and in adaptations of the novels to other media, especially movies. Jane is the love interest and later the wife of Tarzan. She develops over the course of the series from a conventional damsel in distress who must be rescued from various perils to a competent and capable adventuress in her own right, fully capable of defending herself and surviving on her own in the jungles of Africa.

The most famous screen Jane was Maureen O'Sullivan who played opposite Johnny Weissmuller in 1932 and its sequels, which changed the character's name to Jane Porter, portrayed her as English rather than American, and made her and Tarzan the adoptive parents of an orphan they named "Boy."

The Edgar Rice Burroughs's stamp was issued at a ceremony in Los Angeles. Among the celebrities present was the famed researcher Jane Goodall, who claimed that it wasn't the screech of chimpanzees that lured her to dream of the wilds of Tanzania, but Tarzan of the Apes, Lord of the Jungle. "The more I read, the more passionately I fell in love with Tarzan," she said, recalling her pre-teen crush. "I took whichever book I was reading at the time up to the top of my favorite tree in the garden. There I imagined myself living in the forest, living with and helping Tarzan."


PUSHING THE ENVELOPE NO. 169

Charlie Delgado of Ohio clipped a Far Side cartoon out of a book and glued it to this cover and then licked a bunch of stamps to pay the postage, mailing it on Sept. 15 of......Well, the year doesn't seem to show up in the cancellation, but it was a few years ago!!


PUSHING THE ENVELOPE No. 170

John McGuigan used a postcard of ERB looking for "Tarzine" after he purchased the fanzine from Bill Ross, who had published the it under that name for several years. McGuigan sent out this postcard on Sept. 27, 1990, to announce his acquisition. John had high hopes for the magazine and planned to upgrade it to an Arizona Highways quality publication. But, alas, I believe it lasted only about three more issues.


PUSHING THE ENVELOPE NO. 171

Tarzan of the comic books and ERB books has faced dinosaurs but the movie Tarzan hasn't had to deal with them and, in fact, this Einiosaurus is strolling off the cover, away from the first family of the jungle, probably looking for some plants to eat, since it was believed to be a herbivore. It may be a cousin of the Gryf from "Tarzan the Terrible."

Einiosaurus roamed through northwestern Montana.  Its name means 'buffalo lizard', a combination of Blackfeet Indian  eini and Latinized Ancient Greek sauros; the specific name means 'with a  forward-curving horn' in Latin.

The Cover Monster of Ohio made this envelope and mailed it to me on Oct. 4, 1999.


PUSHING THE ENVELOPE NO. 172

When your friends know you like Tarzan, they go to great lengths to send you Tarzan covers, even if the joke is a bit of a groaner. Dennis Gelvin, Olympia, is someone who is sometimes known as the good humor man.
Lines from four popular Christmas carols were featured on stamps issued by the Postal Service on Oct. 5, 2017.


PUSHING THE ENVELOPE NO. 173

Tarzan fans don't mind at all when Wonder Woman shows up. Scott  Tracy Griffin, author of "Tarzan: The Centennial Celebration" and  "Tarzan on Film," was wearing his Tarzan shirt, which no doubt first  attracted Wonder Woman's attention. Dwayne Covey, a member of the North  Coast Mangani, also met Wonder Woman -- or is that her twin sister?
Both cachets have the 75th anniversary Wonder Woman stamps which  were issued in four designs that showed the changes in her costume over  the years. They were postmarked with the official first-day  cancellation on Oct. 7, 2016.


PUSHING THE ENVELOPE No. 174

When the Postal Service issued four "Spooky Silhouette" stamps  on Oct. 12, 2019, it thought of putting bats, ghosts, spiders and a  domestic cat with a raven in the designs, but it didn't think of putting  Tarzan swinging past the window in a tree. Tarzan, of course, can be  pretty scary to his foes.

But that's why there are cachet makers, such as Carolyn Marks  of Minnesota, who think of things the Postal Service doesn't, so she  added the ape man to her cover.
Also thinking beyond the traditional Halloween images was Darcy  Richmond, Texas, who went the domestic cat one better and added a scary  lion to her cachet.


PUSHING THE ENVELOPE NO. 175

Apache Chief Geronimo, an Edgar Rice Burroughs character as well  as a real-life historical figure, was one of 20 people and themes to  appear on a 1994 set of stamps known as "Legends of the West."  The official first-day-of-issue cancellation was in Laramie,  Wyoming, for all 20 stamps, which featured such notables as Wyatt Earp,  Jim Bridger and Annie Oakley. Award-winning cachet maker Fred Collins  made sets of the covers with the official cancellation, but also went  the extra mile and made a second type of set with local cancellations for each stamp from post offices in other towns of the Old West.

In the case of the  Geronimo stamp, he arranged for a special cancellation from Medicine  Bow, Wyoming, on the first day of issue.
Collins's Geronimo cover from Medicine Bow is pictured here,  along with both sides of a Postal Service postcard which has the  Geronimo image on the picture side and the postcard rate postage on the other, with Laramie first-day  cancellation.

 In Collins's hand-painted scene, Geronimo is the one in the  middle, dressed similarly to the image on the stamp. One of the two  braves in the background is probably Shoz-dijiji, the Black Bear, but  I'm not sure which one it is. Geronimo, often called by his Apache name of Go-yat-thlay was  said, by ERB, to have adopted Andy McDuff, who grew up to earn the name  of Shoz-dijiji in "The War Chief" and "Apache Devil."


PUSHING THE ENVELOPE NO. 176 

Pat Lupoff, beloved wife and co-fan of Science Fiction writer  and Burroughs buff Richard Lupoff, passed away just over two years ago  on Oct. 17, 2018. A couple of days later, I made some "In Memory" covers  with an oft-seen image of the couple and was able to pass several of  these along to Richard when I visited with him the following spring  during a gathering of the Northwest Coast Mangani in Folsom, California.

The Wonder Woman stamp seemed an appropriate one to use with  these covers, not only because Richard and Pat were great fans of the  comic books, but also because Pat in her own way was a Wonder Woman.

The name of Richard A. Lupoff came to my attention in the 1960s  Burroughs Boom, when Canaveral Press was republishing some of the Edgar  Rice Burroughs titles which had been out of print for years. Lupoff was  in charge of preparing the books for publication and was also assigned  to write a scholarly book about Burroughs and his works. The book,  titled Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure," came out in 1965 and I  was quick to purchase a copy.

How did Lupoff become an ERB fan in the first place? According  to fan Dick Spargur, of Dayton, Ohio, and others, it was his wife, Pat,  "who had first read a Tarzan novel and suggested he read it."

He did and he was hooked, like so many other longtime fans.

In reminiscing about Pat Lupoff, one of her sons -- Ken -- said,  "Along with my father she played a role in several seminal cultural  events. Together they created 'cos-play,' where folks come together  dressed as their favorite superhero or science fiction/fantasy  character." The photo on the postal cover is of their first such  appearance in costume at a science fiction convention in 1960, with  Richard dressed as comic book hero Captain Marvel and Pat as his twin  sister, Mary Marvel.

Pat and Dick met on a blind date in 1957 and were married a year  later. While Richard was a book author, Mary was co-editor of the  amateur fan magazine, "Xero," and thus she helped launch modern comic  book fandom, Ken said.

Xero could be spectacular, with contributors such as Anthony  Boucher, Harlan Ellison, Ethel Lindsay, Fred Pohl, Rich Sneary, Bob  Tucker as "Hoy Ping Pong," and Harry Warner -- fans and pros mixing it  up. Roger Ebert, later a movie critic, contributed poetry, often  free-style, or formal and funny.

Pat's co-editors were her husband and Bhob Stewart. Pat and Richard  typed stencils in their Manhattan apartment, printed them on a basement  machine, collated them by hand, and lugged the results to sci-fi cons or  stuffed them in mailboxes. In 1963, the trio won a Hugo, the highest  award in science fiction fandom, for their fanzine, making Pat the  second woman to win the distinguished award, named for Hugo Gernsback,  editor of the professional science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories.  She and her husband also co-edited "The Best of Xero," which was a  finalist for the Best Related Book Hugo Award in 2005. She worked on  various other fanzines as well.

 I first met Dick and Pat Lupoff in person in August of 2015 when  I attended a gathering of Edgar Rice Burroughs fans in Willows, Calif.,  hosted by the Northwest Coast Mangani,  a chapter of The Burroughs Bibliophiles. Since Northern California  through Washington is Bigfoot, or Sasquatch, country, the name of their  Mangani cousins was adopted as most of the group members are from those  areas.

"She was my father's muse throughout the '70s and '80s, reading  and discussing many of his novels with him in the drafting stages," said  Ken of his mother. In the mid-80s, she worked at Cody's on Telegraph  Avenue in Berkeley, as the children's section book buyer, building it  into one of the country's preeminent collections.

Xero was not originally intended to be comics-oriented, but  became very involved after a nostalgic article by Richard featuring a  series on old comic books called "All in Color for a Dime." The articles  in this series were later reprinted in two books: "All in Color for a  Dime" (1970) and "The Comic Book Book" (1973).

ERBzine References:
Richard Lupoff Remembered in ERBzine
https://www.erbzine.com/mag30/3047.html
https://www.erbzine.com/mag30/3048.html
https://www.erbzine.com/mag30/3048a.html
Pat Lupoff Remembered in ERBzine
https://www.erbzine.com/mag67/6728.html


PUSHING THE ENVELOPE NO. 177

We all remember the movie "Tarzan Meets Frankenstein" in which the ape man, in the person of Lex Barker, took on the Frankenstein monster, right? Well, John Colasanti of Dora, Michigan, does and he made this cover to commemorate the movie, having it canceled on Oct. 31 of last year. One thing is for sure, if there were really such a movie, we'd probably all have it in our collections.

We do know for sure, though, that there was a movie titled "Tarzan Finds a Son!" It introduced Johnny Sheffield as the orphan adopted by Johnny Weissmuller's Tarzan and Maureen O'Sullivan's Jane. When a stamp commemorating the 50th anniversary of motion pictures was issued, Oct. 31, 1944, someone made this first-day cover and used four of the stamps, with the cachet highlighting "Tarzan Finds a Son!," which had been released five years earlier.

The last cover is another first-day cover for the motion picture stamp, with a design showing an outdoor movie screen up against an Army transport plane. Troops in out-of-the-way locations were often entertained after the sun went down by being shown movies in such unusual locations. And no doubt they sometimes saw Tarzan movies, but probably not "Tarzan Meets Frankenstein."

To see more covers by John Colasanti, check out his facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/JvcCachets/
Image may contain: 2 people, text that says '0 USAC FOREVER JVC'19 THEATERS LOWEEN NIGHT TARZAN meets FRANKENSTEIN'


PUSHING THT ENVELOPE NO. 178

 Is there really a Tarzan Lego, or Lego set, or are all these I  see online just assembled from other Lego pieces and sets by other people to represent the ape man and  Jane? There's a tutorial video on youtube showing how to create Tarzan  and Jane using parts of other figures. If anyone knows if there's really  a licensed set, please advise. If not, Lego is missing a good bet.

But one thing we know for sure: There are postal covers showing  Tarzan and Jane Lego style, as in this one placed on a cover by the  late Dalene Thomas, Colorado, who was a big fan of Legos and even  designated some of her covers, featuring photos of Lego scenes, as a  "Brick Builder Cachet."


PUSHING THE ENVELOPE NO. 179

Nanski Drewski of Massachusetts put Bolgani the gorilla on a cover to drive off the tiger cub on the stamp, as the animal doesn't belong in Tarzan's Africa. This was a stamp in the Postal Service's semi-postal program, priced a few cents above the normal first-class rate, with the extra money donated to funds to save endangered species. At least $5.5 million was donated from sales of the stamps.


PUSHING THE ENVELOPE NO. 180

Stan Lee, Marvel 'Comics maestro, passed away Nov. 12, 2018, and was honored on at least three "In Memory" covers postmarked on the date of his death.
Lee's Marvel published the Tarzan comic, issues 1-29, from June 1977 to October 1979, and published John Carter, Warlord of Mars, over the same time period. In addition, there were three Tarzan King-Size Annuals and three John Carter King-Size Annuals.
. Marvel also published two Tarzan comics as tie-ins with the movie, "The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes," and came out with a Marvel Magazine with the story of "The Land That Time Forgot."
When Lee died, Donnie Mangus, Tennessee, drew his own portrait of Lee on his cover with his "Celebrity Death Date" postmark and also used two stamps from the Marvel Super Heroes issue of 2007.
I made a cover with a picture of Lee, stickers showing a couple of his characters, and two Marvel Super Heroes stamps.
Dennis Gelvin, Olympia, used his cover to present a brief history of Lee's accomplishments along with a stamp issued in 2018 celebrating The Art of Magic.

When Marvel’s Stan Lee died, Donnie Mangus, Tennessee, drew his own portrait of Lee on his cover with his "Celebrity Death Date" postmark and also used two stamps from the Marvel Super Heroes issue of 2007. In the 70s, Lee’s Marvel published several Tarzan and John Carter comics and a special magazine retelling of Burroughs’s “The Land That Time Forgot.”

I made a memorial cover with a picture of Marvel’s Stan Lee, stickers showing a couple of his characters, and two Marvel Super Heroes stamps. In the 70s, Lee’s Marvel published several Tarzan and John Carter comics and a special magazine retelling of Burroughs’s “The Land That Time Forgot.”

Dennis Gelvin, Olympia, used his cover to present a brief history of Lee's accomplishments along with a stamp issued in 2018 celebrating The Art of Magic. In the 70s, Lee’s Marvel published several Tarzan and John Carter comics and a special magazine retelling of Burroughs’s “The Land That Time Forgot.”

VISIT ALL THE MARTIN STAMP FEATURES IN ERBzine
https://www.erbzine.com/martin/#stamps



Read All The John Martin Features in ERBzine
www.ERBzine.com/martin

BackForward

BILL HILLMAN
Visit our thousands of other sites at:
BILL AND SUE-ON HILLMAN ECLECTIC STUDIO
All ERB Images© and Tarzan® are Copyright ERB, Inc.- All Rights Reserved.
All Original Work © 1996-2020 by Bill Hillman and/or Contributing Authors/Owners
No part of this web site may be reproduced without permission from the respective owners.