 It is one of the supreme ironies of my life that I now make public and disclose to the world what I kept secret for all these years. And some of you know this, my FOC people, because I've mentioned it before. But today the context is different and the lives of other people are involved. And that is, of course, that I am a gay man. When I discovered this many years ago, in the time between leaving high school and entering college, it was a nightmare. Gayness was a crime. If you were discovered, you were sent to prison. If you were discovered by the wrong people, you were blackmailed for the rest of your life. And those who couldn't stand it any longer jumped from high-rise buildings. So one of the reasons I mention this today is because in spite of the so-called era of tolerance that we are living in now, every day there are thousands of young people, mostly men, gay men, committing suicide because their families don't want them and their communities don't want them. But I want them. I want them to live. And so I speak for them. Because when this nightmare began my life, there was only one single out person in the world, one. And he was Oscar Wilde. And everybody knew what had happened to him. And I felt I had no future. And so I began every day for almost the next 20 years trying to kill myself. It was very labor-intensive, mentally speaking. And then I decided to postpone it. I thought, well, I'll do it when I'm 30. And so years later at college in England, I met a woman who was very distraught. And she felt that if she had a baby, her life would have meaning again. So I am a gallant individual. And I figured, well, I'm going to throw my life away anyway. Let's help her. So I did. And I thought, we'll have the baby, and then I will disappear, and she won't even remember my name. So in due time, we had the baby. Stephen Blackman, the hero of today's lecture. He was very beautiful and very funny. And he became more interesting every single day. And we became each other's best friend. And those who were at the exhibit across the hall two summers ago know that he died six years ago now. He was 55, a very distinguished, happy videographer. He loved his work so much that he kept saying he would do it for free because it was so much fun. And I have a friend who said to me, when my son died, I thought I would never be happy again. And I thought that was me also. But to my astonishment, and I cannot figure this out, I'm one of the happiest people I know and happier even than when I was young. So I'm grateful and very lucky for that. So I have a couple of questions for you. This lecture has been publicized in various ways. So among the FOC people here, who has not met me before? Thank you for coming. Among the library people here who has not met me before. Thank you. I guess that I had some more questions, but I can't remember so. You're lucky. Okay, I won't talk about first aid covers except to say that in my family, long ago as children, we were stamp collectors and so we knew what these were. It's an envelope with a stamp canceled on the first day that it was sold to the public with the name of the city and the date. If you have these, it's a success. And there are still people who collect them, I can't imagine why, because there are no more stamp shops in San Francisco when I began in the 50s. There were at least four, including the Emporium, which is no longer there. And I believe that every country that issues stamps does this because it makes money for them. People buy stamps and they don't use them, so that's a win-win for the government. In this country, they're all canceled at various cities on various dates. And I knew about this because I was working at the time I resumed at Rincon Annex downtown where there was a poster every month on the new stamp that was coming out. And I had remembered in my own case as a child the joy and the exhilaration of receiving my own personal mail. And I know that some of you roughly about my age can remember this from your own childhood. And I wanted Stephen to experience this. So at first his covers go across the bay to Berkeley and then later when his mother took him back to England to live they go back to Oxford. And during the course of his childhood there he would send me first day covers from England and ever since he was tiny he was Big Steve. So he used to call me Big Al. And he addressed all his covers to me, Big Al, et cetera, et cetera, San Francisco, California. So if you want to know how to get one of these then look it up on the web because the procedure has changed several times over the years and I have been away for it now for a while and I don't know what they do but I'm sure that they still issue first day covers. So I will begin with what you see on the screen which is for every envelope I would do a layout on tracing paper. I would put that in my envelope, put it on a light box and then with color and either a pen or a quill as we become calligraphers and go on and learn more and more we learn how to cut feathers to become quills that we can write with and the advantage for me was that it gives a much finer line on the paper than a steel pen does. So the first stamp I don't remember it had something to do with textiles or weaving or something like that. The second one you will see later as an envelope and the third one is Humphrey Bogar and you will see that also as an envelope and we have a great many slides to go so there will be a break 15 minutes for you to stand up and stretch and yawn if you haven't been yawning already and please don't leave because the most interesting ones are in the second half so now is this going to work? Okay the top one which is a mess I didn't know to leave it out or keep it in it's for a movie dick Herman Melview in other words and for some reason I used a brush and acrylic because I thought it would give a more watery look the red one around the circle is for a friendship with Morocco and look how friendly we are with Morocco today the triangle I'll talk about that later you will see it and the bottom one was again acrylic and you will see that as a Christmas stamp it's one of the most beautiful of them for foreign stamps I would always write with my best handwriting to the postal administration of whatever country that was so the top one was the Bank of California you can see what their check looked like this is this no this is the back of them the back of my checks when they came back to me were often more interesting than the front look how many postal administrations they went through how many signatures even a stamp from New Zealand now your checks don't come back to you at all so look what you miss okay there are two envelopes that I bought because I was there at the time there was a postal expo in London in 1970 and I saw this envelope which I thought was gorgeous as we say so I wrote my name on the bottom I had a brand new Parker Broadpoint fountain pen in my pocket that's what I used and then I handed it in and paid whatever it was they sent it to Edinburgh put the stamps on, cancelled it and sent it back to me in San Francisco there were two at that event this is one and I think this is one of their most beautiful stamps of all time historic issues as you can see the cancellation is important for them it is the first one that was ever used they call this the Maltese Cross and that was my handwriting in 1970 and this is the first American one the same handwriting that stamp is called flag over the White House it was six cents I don't know what it is today okay I was very lucky in choosing my envelopes just by chance the first envelopes I bought were a box of 100 you can see at Neiman Marcus I always chose one of San Francisco's exclusive department stores because I like the way they emboss the envelope that means almost as much to me as my writing on the front because I'm a snob and you can see all those marks are all the postal cancelling machines that this went through in order to come back to me this is again an early one and there are some people who collect only these the stamp is for one cent and a quarter of a cent and he was Albert Gallatin I think he was Swiss he came to this country I think he was the first secretary of the treasury or something like that so this is cancelled in Los Angeles and this cover went to Boston where they cancelled it on the back as you can see in that it says airport mail facility Boston that's the only first flight cover that I'm aware of some of you will remember this progression of ABCDEFG stamps and at that time when I was living on Schrader Street I had a D in my address I cannot do that now and this is probably this is 1985 I began in 68 it took me that long to realise that stamps were individual that I did not need italic handwriting address under there the image on the stamp finally reached my brain that this was individual and so that is this one 1985 okay this kind of breaks my heart because this was the first love stamp and I did not know about that until that morning in order to get this into the mail so I forget the name of that designer who is it because when you go to Philadelphia there's a huge square block of metal in this shape with this colour it is, thank you Robert and Indiana that would have been totally different had I had time this was the second love stamp which I did not admire in the least this one along the way I stole this lettering style from one of our FOC members a fellow named Peter Bailey you may recognise him from being red dog Pie Face in On the Road by Jack Kerouac he lived here in the Zen Centre and he had on his wall a piece of lettering that he designed that when you looked at it it looked like grass the whole thing it was mind-boggling and when you looked long enough you could read it it was a poem it said where is the wind to lull the grass that deer may pause to drink and so Peter this is in your honour red dog ok, some of you may recognise this this is sister Mary Corita aka Corita Kent she was a nun I forget her order at Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles she was the teacher of David Mechelberg who was my first calligraphy teacher and she was famous at the time for these wild silk screen pieces that she designed Life Magazine and then Mahatma Gandhi down there and then Wonder Bread and then Franklin Roosevelt they were wildly sold throughout California and probably the country and maybe the world now they are collectors items so she designed this and I had several covers that I did for myself and I did one for her because she was coming to Oakland to an exhibit and I thought I would go this and have her autograph it with my other ones because collectors are thrilled when they can get the signature of the designer of the stamp on their envelope but she didn't come she was beginning to be very ill in Boston as an art director Corita Kent and she died so she never saw this so this I guess is now dedicated to her this was another I don't know how many of you are remembering these stamps but they all appeared during your lifetimes as well as mine and I don't know where I had the patience to do this because I don't think I could do it now there's another similar one later on here's the design that you saw I could see Lynn's Stamp News was a publication from Sydney, Ohio that came out every week and I could see what was coming out and so I saw this cancellation and of course I wanted it and so I designed this the next year they repeated it again but I did not get that this is the first of the Pride cancellations organizations had been battling the US government to please have a Pride cancellation and finally they got this one I went to the US stamp company on Bush Street downtown to get the Walt Whitman stamp they're not there anymore and the people who decide this there is a stamp advisory something council when I looked at it there were 25 people and one is always famous usually like a football player or a sportsman and to be a member of the stamp citizens advisory board there are three qualifications you have to hate posted stamps you have to have failed art history and you have to be blind that way they will take you to be one of their own and so you will be partly responsible for the next batch of US stamps okay I'm very fond of the gold nugget days from Paradise, California and I went to the stamp shop to get the California stamp from 1930 and I used fake gold ink for the lettering I learned early on that real gold was not satisfactory we have something called shell gold but it was not appropriate for those of you who adored the Jeremiah O'Brien and I know that at least one of you sales out every year with it into the bay I saw the cancellation I bought the historic stamps and I used a current US stamp on the right to receive this this is Death Ride station from Mark Leeville, California and who could not send away for this and this is one of my favorite outer joint at the joint station Santa Fe, New Mexico again quite irresistible and this one, Piggy Express from Oklahoma I made it red intentionally or yes, pink I think I'm not sure, red but I used matching stamps and this is one of my favorite the Pony Express which has a fascinating history if you look it up on the web you will be amazed how short it lived very short span of time but my posted stamp again from downtown equals the cancellation and this is another favorite Whiskey Flat Days again from California with the guy in the bathtub which is what I had my initial A doing okay this is a whole series which I think is probably the best one that the US Postal Service I think it's called the transportation series and because it's a coral stamp what we collectors do is we show you that it was a strip if we had one single stamp on that you would not have known the format so there are several here and there are so many slides here I was going to cull these but I can't see what's coming so I don't know so here you will see them this was the bicycle and at this time as a design feature I had the strip going across the top and I had lettering going across the bottom in order to produce a harmony there and this is the canoe so again this is zeroing in on the subject of the stamp and this is the milk wagon so this is my favorite letter A of all I have that I have ever designed okay I'm proud of this this is another format these and this is equally fascinating I don't know what they called it probably famous Americans so I don't remember if this is the first or not but this was Audubon so there's a block of four up there and then there's a block down there and to signal him out the initial becomes a bird this was some unidentified general who we would never know his name and this you know in the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea with a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me and I know you love this ballad just like I do also too as God is marching on Julia what how how Julia I love that song and if I had to do this today I would make this his flaming terrible swift sword I hadn't thought of that in 1987 this is supposed to be John Harvard up there and they didn't know what he looked like because there were no surviving portraits but apparently there's a statue of him on the campus and that's what they used for the image this is Sitting Bull okay there are two envelopes in this collection where the address is derived from one of my teachers as a calligrapher this was not a teacher but I had this man's alphabet in my collection he was Kennedy Smith of Brit and I was very pleased with the with my configuration I think his flat unshel writing is the most beautiful I have ever seen much more attractive than the slanted version and I thought well I should after all this time of using his alphabet I should let him know and send him thanks so I wrote to the SSI in Britain and I said can you please send me Kennedy Smith's address and months later I received a note from them we're terribly sorry but he has died several years ago so if you're up there thank you and this of course some of you will recognize this handwriting it's derived from Friedrich Neugebauer in Austria who is one of the gifted lettering artists of all time he came here to teach several times including a ten day workshop in Ben Lomond down the coast and when he first came to our knowledge he invited American calligraphers to come to learn from him in Austria near Salzburg where he lived and I could not go but Virginia Le Roux who was at one time secretary when I was president of the FOC she went and that Christmas she sent me a Christmas card with this handwriting on it so I copied her writing for this envelope it had nothing to do with Robert Kennedy but I was learning his lettering style okay this is again I don't know why this is here but here it is a fire engine from the 1900s and this guy is putting out my name okay this to me is the worst photo of the cable car that they could have I don't know where they got this they got this from the reject pile I think it's absurd this is 1988 okay I was very pleased with this this is 1982 I love that stamp if I had to do this again I would not use this format which reminds me of my exhibit across the hall two years ago which was masterminded by possibly three people in this world in this room one of them was Andrea Grimes another was Anne Carroll who is the most charming and skillful person that the library staff ever employed and the other if she is looking down Susie Taylor I hope you're here okay this is quite significant 1983 when I looked at this one and Steven's next to it his because he was in England needed more postage than mine so on his envelope there is a block of four and the page is so much more attractive than this than ever after that I used four stamps on my own envelope even though it cost me more money but that was not the point and since I was Brooklyn born this has even more meaning for me this is quite pleasing they were trying to get children involved in becoming future stamp collectors and this was the pretext for that this you saw in the layout as soon as I saw the stamp I knew what I would do so I didn't care what the subject was okay this is 1986 I've got that far for Duke Ellington I had forgotten what a piano looked like so I went back to look at one and these keys are actually accurate you can play this if you wish and get St. Louis blues or something like that and this is Louis Armstrong leading his people through the streets of Memphis, Tennessee or wherever and because this also was a bad situation there are more I don't remember exactly when these little people began appearing in my lettering but there they are okay this is the fellow who designed the Statue of Liberty, Bartholdi this belongs actually with another one you will see soon of St. Junipero Serra I did the two at the same time using almost the same layout and this in Shelburne, Vermont there is a museum of duck decoys this is friendship with Morocco and I was quite pleased to be able to Islamophile the address how friendly are we okay this is probably the ugliest stamp that the post office has ever designed I don't know if it helped hunger in any way and I almost never used the brush in designing these envelopes I didn't have the confidence even though it was my quote signature lettering tool I began with the lettering brush but I thought this was more or less harmonious with the block of stamps up there here's Herman Melville again and this is the other butterfly or at least this is the first have we had this? I don't remember this was ostensibly for the international year of the child 1985 this is again the little people and Knut Rockney was a world famous athlete as was Lou Gehrig from Cooperstown, New York and Hemingway from Key West, Florida now partially warped off the map from the last hurricane and probably nobody even golfers probably don't know this man's name Francis, we met we may and here is Bogart from Los Angeles, California and this is Republic of Statehood from Washington on the Brazos so this is a Yankee shooting at a peon sitting there for a man duking it out this was the Bill of Rights from Philadelphia and this lettering was designed by Julian Waters and they had altered it somewhat by making the lines heavier than what he originally wrote and the world of calligraphy was up in arms at the U.S. Postal Service for doing that without notifying him in advance or asking permission this was 1989 I forget if I was still a postal employee at that time but I left with one of their hats, okay? Okay, this was Montana Statehood from Helena, Montana or Helena, I don't know how they pronounce it okay, Arturo Toscanini was one of the most famous people of my childhood he was revered as a guard by his orchestra and the public and this is Leonard Bernstein and many people feel that way about him so the first one influenced the second, of course this is 1993 and if I had this one to do over I would make the initial A at least twice that size I didn't think of that at that time okay, this is Cabrillo from San Diego and I was very happy to be able to get all of these letters into a format that looked like this and I think this is still the U.S. Postal's most popular stamp of all time it was when it was being sold and I think it still is and I didn't know until I taught a class in Memphis, Tennessee and my hostess drove me to Graceland and this cancellation is the metal gates at the entrance to Graceland and you can see him playing the guitar there if you look closely this was 1993 and this one is the only envelope that is not canceled because the stamp news had a little notice that the first day cover club of I guess Tennessee had prepared a cancellation with Elvis Presley's name in the shape of a guitar and wow I wanted to see that so I designed these two envelopes for us and sent this off and it came back with a note we are terribly sorry but the Elvis Presley Foundation did not authorize this and so we are not doing it so they broke about 15 million stamp collectors hearts across the country and returned all of our envelopes I saw this in the news paper so I knew what it looked like the National Postal Museum in Washington D.C. but I didn't know it would be blue so luckily I have found over the course of time that if I used blue it was probably safe no matter what the stamp looked like but I was really lucky where this little guy is eating a popsicle a good humor actually chocolate cupboard as soon as I saw this stamp I knew what I would do and this is one of my favorite ones although of course the father does not have favorites amongst his children you know that this was the Asian New Year they've done them all now probably several rotations I'm not quite sure I tried many, a lot did not work this is the best one I don't think there may be another one in this series okay this is from a large sheet and this is my son and my own favorite aeroplane the GB even though we've never seen one in real I think they're from the 30s I would love to see one of these fly maybe someday and this is days in Ohio where I think there is a race okay this is Georgia O'Keeffe of course and it's canceled in Santa Fe which is part of her territory this is for prisoner of war and missing in action people and if you go out to the veterans administration building on Clement and 42nd Avenue you will see that they fly the flag for the missing in action people and once every while they find the remains of one and dig it up and send it home or a prisoner of war this is so obvious I don't have to tell you what it is but it reminds me of many years ago Neiman Marcus which is birthed in Texas either Dallas or Houston I forget for their Christmas calendar they had a fruit cake designed in the shape of Texas which was the most beautiful I had ever seen so I sent for one no matter the astronomical price I had to pay and I hoped that they would do it every year but they only did it that once it looked exactly like this okay this is my last one of the American series and you will remember the hearts in San Francisco at every street corner there was one decorated by a local artist this was the best I could do I used what's called frisket or rub out or something it's like rubber cement you write with it you color over it and then you erase and then you see your white lettering it's very crude but there it is okay this is self-explanatory from the San Diego Zoo canceled in San Diego this is the one that we saw before for Barthaldi this is now Saint Unifero Serra many people love him and many people hate him and you know the reasons for that okay this to my knowledge was the first of the Walt Disney stamps of now they have been a billion but this is not from the US this is from the tiny Republic of San Marino in Italy and I show this because this is what happens when it's registered and it comes to your doorstep and you're not home and so your postal man writes on the bottom note left no response 1571 okay and this is another this comes back from Iceland you're not home it says final notice no response 33070 with his initials okay you learn to live with that this is what happens when it's a one cent stamp and the postage is 24 cents or something like that what are you going to do okay again it's from the transportation series I'll go very quickly through these these were there was a sheet of 35 at that time there were 35 presidents so this I tried to modernize my handwriting to fit Franklin Roosevelt sort of art deco thing this is my most formal italic handwriting and this is sort of roster capitals and this is a lettering style I'm very fond of called civility which I hope to master someday and it's canceled in Quincy, Massachusetts a lot of these birth places are no longer there because the towns have changed they don't exist anymore so they chose the closest one that they could find and this is Kennedy and I tried to be modern for that Brookline, Massachusetts and Chester Arthur this is looking and some of you remember if you were adherents of Herb Cain's column that the son of Chester Arthur Gavin Arthur was a man about town in San Francisco in the news all the time for some escapade or event he had attended or dinner he sponsored blah blah blah he was very vocal parading his father's memory this is because there were 35 presidents and there were 36 blanks in the sheet of stamps they had an extra space and they filled it with the White House which I thought was beautiful and intelligent and I'm very fond of how this turned out this is a sort of a sign painters format with a large letter at the beginning and a large letter derived from the lettering in the text at the end so I thought this turned out quite well okay this one belongs to the next one the layout is the same but this is the popular stamp for Christmas and this was designed by a child in Jamaica, New York where he lived and so that's where the first day ceremony was they were hoping again to get children to become future stamp collectors so this layout which looks like this in red and blue is exactly the same as this which is formal in gold ink so this is when Christmas stamps really used to look like stamps 1984 today they look like something you should throw immediately in the trash okay I was quite pleased with this this is cancelled in Santa Claus, Indiana they tried always to have a relationship there I don't know if they still do and this I stole from Susie Taylor because she had designed a greeting card for John Prestiani in this format but using the entire text I just used the name and address and because this art by Raphael is in the National Gallery this is cancelled Washington DC and this is what you saw before again I don't know why I used acrylic for this it just seemed like the stamp was so predominant it needed something more substantial down there and this is Nazareth, Michigan as you can see this again is formal in Detroit where this thing is in the Detroit Museum of Fine Arts no doubt and again I don't recognize who that is but this is the formal one okay this was a co-issue between Moscow in Russia and Baltimore, Maryland I haven't been there but there's one of America's most extravagant aquariums maybe some of you have seen it and this is here because I saw riding the bus one morning a fellow wearing one of these hats you know this huge thing that they wear to football games and I was so fascinated by it that I have incorporated into my text okay at home I have boxes of rejects by the hundreds of failures things that did not work that I never show to anyone so I will show you about four and then you will promise never to tell anyone that you've seen them so this has nothing to do with anything certainly not crazy hoes but I wanted some sort of something that was different from my usual italic okay I went through several crises of which this is just one so this is one and this is another same because I had the layout words fail me as you can see I didn't have the word street is not even in there good lord okay I have to have a terrible apology now because for the black history series all of the stamps from beginning to end and there have been zillions of them are hideous they have really been putting black people down by issuing ugly stamps and I was perplexed by the theory of blackness in my text I thought well how can I equal that it dawned on me about two days ago that why didn't you figure out who she was was she a writer you could have had writing was she a nurse was she a scientist I could have used the subject matter never dawned on me it was always blackness they were always terrible again since I am quote a victim I will say patient of the veterans administration out here on 42nd Avenue and Clement where you see that logo as you approach I could have done wonders with this I don't know why I didn't think of it was I hating them that time I don't think so I've given that up anyway okay this is before I met Ward Dunham so please don't tell anybody you've ever seen this okay we've reached Australia I don't know how the time goes I think we can finish so stand up and stretch and relax for five minutes I will set my never fail iPhone haha okay this I think is beginning Australia and this is not really a stamp technically this is a seal there were several probably four or five or more this was the next one it's a platypus and at this time 1986 their cancellation was not very adventurous this was to my knowledge the first skateboard on a postage stamp these are Australia for a while and there's also a hand glider and you see that in the cancellation so they have advanced that okay this is one of my favorite series of all times there are four of them this was New Zealand's first round stamp so I had the layout this is actually the second one 1997 this was the first 1988 I thought this was so beautiful the stamp with the Kiwi and the detailed engraving and the circularness there was once an instructor on the Berkeley campus who taught a class design within the circle he would love this this is one of the next and so I matched the color and this is probably the last I don't recall so I these are quite I'm about to say breathtaking but that's praising my own work we're not supposed to do that we're supposed to be shy and say oh it's just terrible okay this was this was New Zealand commemorating postage by pigeon I don't remember how long it lasted but I have got pigeongram up there where it says airmail I didn't do that very often this is sort of explanatory for New Zealand and this is one of my favorite envelopes of all time this is roughly five by eight it's a medium size between small and gigantic and this was from British Antarctic territory and it came back to me with a letter saying the envelope that you sent was too small so we have put these on a larger one and written your name in pencil down there so that you can erase it and write your own text so I would not change this for the world you can see how human those people are down there and sometimes some of these would take a year to come back to me I love this because the stamp is so beautiful and this is Montserrat which now has been wiped off the face of the earth by Hurricane Irma and I think Britain is wondering what on earth are they going to do with it now this white elephant that we have in the Caribbean what are those people going to do this is Canada and this is important David Lemon because Adobe had asked me they knew what my calligraphy looked like because of one or two friends of calligraphy working for Adobe they said can we see your work because we want a quirky alphabet so this is what they chose for my typeface gala hat which is not quirky in the least okay they chose something formal close to this okay this was a series of four Canadian railways and look at the cancellation it's some sort of hook thing and I have two I did not get the last ones but this is another one I don't know if I have this patience today I don't think so but that's negative I will retract that statement and as soon as I saw this I knew what my design would be and I taught my first Canadian workshop was in Calgary and they put us up at a hotel and as soon as I turned on the television sat there was the logo of the Canadian broadcasting service which I recognized from my first day cover and if you look at the upper left you will see five little colored dots which is the registration for the five different colors that they used this appeared on the four end corners of the complete sheet that they published when I realized this I asked for it every time because it makes a much more complete picture this is a fellow who during his lifetime was a rebel fighting against the government one of the METIS Métis who now they honor as a brave indigenous person or something like that at the time they were fighting him this is an example for calligraphers where if you change the color every time you don't have to separate the lines and I wanted my lettering fighting each other to the death if they could so they all interact there and the cancellation is not bad okay this was the international year of either the child or youth you can see the United Nations logo in the center and if you look at the registration dots going down there's one two three four yellow five there's another one which is raised it is embossed and when I discovered that I looked at the stamp it was something must be embossed and when I looked carefully the head of the pigeon and the tail are both raised from the flat surface if I had not seen that in the registry there I would not have known this is the attention that they pay to their stamps this is again something about the international year of young something or other again you see the United Nations logo with the four faces in it and this is a neon arrow going through a heart over somebody's blue jeans and this is a stamp celebrating la presse and the whole text is made up of that word repeated but graded so that you can see the face of the owner of the press whatever his name Berton again it has a D I cannot do this where I live now this was a Canadian woman who fought on the Iroquois she was for on the side of the British during the American Revolutionary War and she is wearing the Union Jack on her chest and so I have there below the name and again I use some sort of a frisket rubber cement like solution to do the lettering then I did the color then I erased carefully and then you see the white lettering underneath it can be rewarding it can be hair raising that technique depending on how careful you are this is for the Olympics in 12 no 88 I don't know anywhere there's skiing in the design and so my people are skiing and ice skating that's a companion to it and I still haven't really looked at what on earth this is but when I saw this image on the stamp I thought I will give that a try and I thought I was successful and it is so made the Quebec Quebec summit okay there we are 1987 you can see that this is Canadian technology and I thought this was one of my best covers ever I'm really pleased with this and this is the first Braille stamp that I know there have been more but I have not seen them and this is from a city in Denmark Fredericia which is very easy going for handicapped people like this street furniture is manageable for visually impaired etc etc so many years ago moonlighting from a job at UC Medical Center I would leave one day every week extra I had a car at that time I drove out to the beach to the Bay Area Braille society I thought if I could learn Braille it would help my calligraphy maybe because I was in distress at that time and so for these envelopes I sort of took them apart reversed them and I punched the lettering in to be my name and Stevens and I realized years later that I made a mistake because for a capital letter which my A is I should have had another dot in front so here I am in lower case Braille letters ok this is 9x12 it's quite huge and I cannot do flourishes like some of my brilliant colleagues do I'm green up here with envy I just dashed it off as they're writing I have to have a layout exactly penciled in and then I will meticulously go over it with my pointed pen nib so I wanted this because these are famous graphic designers of Finland and probably Finns don't even know who they are of course they were mentioned in the stamp news this is for Andrea Grimes because she is infatuated with the movement as I am how many of you are infatuated by movements 1, 2, look how many hands ok well this is a card it's not an envelope I had to design the label with a movement on it send it to them with the money and then they put it on this card and send it back to me ok this was a stroke of luck because this stamp and France issues one of these huge stamps I think every year this is the only one I have they are breathtaking I saw the stamp in the stamp news but it was in black and white and I thought I want that so I designed the configuration and I usually have good luck designing red, blue and green usually whatever it is will turn out to be presentable so I started with that and then by a whim I chose yellow but I did and it turned out to be exactly what's on the stamp which was one of my great strokes of good luck and you see the cancellation it's a window in the cathedral of Strasbourg and this is also from the Council of Europe in Strasbourg for these I had to send a bank draft a check would not suffice and when we looked carefully with a microscope, a magnifying glass what's coming out of there is a child's shoe so there comes my A I'm very happy with this address I think these three stamps, red, blue and green really beautiful, there are several of these this is issued every year in the Antarctic territory and this took a year to come back because I think they only had a ship that goes down there once a year and this envelope which is something like 5 by 8 inches I designed this for the commemorative stamp of Princess Grace of Monaco and somehow it was returned to me blank with the stamp and a souvenir sheet and something else I forget why my envelope was not sufficient for them but I had to act in a hurry I sent it off to the South Pacific and it worked and these are sort of the stamps of what they look like in our childhood I will say our because some of you are almost in the same age bracket this was next year again where they are real stamps designed engraved with meticulous care and I kept the same format and this was questionable for a long time shall I leave it in or take it out we looked at it the other day and the stamps are from Holland, Nader Lund and even though the lettering is geometric and I thought why didn't I make a great big blue A in the front or fill in these circles with color this is what you learn later whatever that's called this is Germany 50 years of the stamp of the postage stamp and I stole this format from the cover of the cover society where they had little envelopes going down and this worked perfectly okay there are two of these this is Steven's namesake, Richard Wagner this was I saw the image in black and white in Linstamp News I didn't know what to do but I thought blue usually works and then I thought well he's royal he's purple and it looks like it's intentional and I have up there AML and then Schwanpost and then Pa Avion so this is mine and my letter A is a swan and so is Steven's because he never did get to see this I'm terribly sorry I wanted to send it to him but I wanted to keep the two together and here we are again and this is Austria for the International Richard Wagner Congress in Vienna 1986 so here is my swan again the same and here is Steven's and they put these confounded stickers on there which I hate by that time nothing I can do this is about 8 inches long I forget it's a wide envelope it is for the it's from Guernsey in the Channel Islands and two things it stamps on stamps which some collectors collect only the image of previously issued stamps on current ones used for postage and I forget what the anniversary was here I think it was the anniversary of the Penny Black the first one on the left but again the so called Maltese Cross historic postman post mark ok this was Olympics there was this sheet of stamps a souvenir sheet and I thought that what I did for this was quite good at the risk of sounding a bit risqué if I had to do this over I would have a little dick on that first guy but I either didn't think of it or I didn't have the nerve I forget which but I do love this series and in the cancellation it's hard to see but there's the wreath of the victor ok here's the other one which is brush written although I don't do it much and this designer was a famous British artist named Sir Hugh Cassron who noted for his watercolors and in some of them he has a very fine line around the subject matter and so I took my pointed pen and I made a very fine line under some of the well most of the letters in the name this is one of the most exciting stamps of all time of any country of the designer Thomas de la Rue RUE he designed the playing card on the left he designed the fountain pen next to it he designed the whatever is going on it's a printing press right he designed the first British postage stamp and he designed the money there's a pound note there on the end and so I have got some of that into my name down there I think if the US postage department saw this they would have a stroke ok this is hummingbirds Guernsey, thank you and you can't see it well but there's a hummingbird there's a butterfly excuse me this is butterflies there's a butterfly in the cancellation and this is a companion to that Isle of Man you saw again it's a long envelope with the Maltese cross it's one of my favorite envelopes because I thought there's such harmony there between address and stamp it's Swedish board games I guess the cancellation with the dust dice was shown in the Linn stamp news so I knew what I was sending for so I designed this and sent it off to them with an ordinary postmark that said Sweden so I wrote them a letter and I said this is what you advertise in the newspaper, why do you send me this oh we are terribly sorry if you send us another envelope we will send you the correct cancellation so I did it over and I sent it and they did for this it was worth doing this was another combined first day with Sweden and the United States and this is the Swedish stamp and in the third one you'll see it later they are magnifying the American 3 cent stamp I forget the year but it commemorated the founding of the Swedes and Finns this is Britain I forgot to mention these envelopes are about 7 inches by 4 you should have known that in the beginning this is the pound, 10 pounds which is rather expensive and there is Britannia with her trident and I am one of the very few people in the Queen Mother this is celebrating her 80th birthday and all of the almost hundreds of thousands of islands and territories that Britain owned they all brought out stamps in her honor and I have a 405 in my lifetime during World War II while some of you remember that she and her husband George VI they stayed in Britain during the bombing when other royalties in other countries fled they had tremendous courage and I respect her for that here she is in the cycle of her life a girl, a woman a Queen Mother cancelled in Edinburgh as Britain does I like to look at this cover I am proud of her she became a figure of fun as she got older and was ridiculed hugely in the British press this is a format that Britain brings out frequently of the useful stamps and in the middle the reason for them so this is excuse me Agatha Christie, Queen of Crime and you can see there is the keyhole that the bad man is peeping through this was British textiles and I love these stamps they are so beautiful I think cancellation is sort of a textile thing weaving the first one is by William Morris you can recognize that and the others I am not quite sure the third one is Paul Nash a well-known British designer they are really lovely I am sorry that I didn't know at that time to be more adventurous ok these are long I think they are 12 inches by 4 something like that and these are the British Christmas stamps and they alternate every year there is a popular one and then a religious one and then popular and then religious etc and we do that also but nothing like this right this was the first one that I saw and there is a dove in every stamp the first one it is in the shrubbery the next one it is on that lamppost then it is under that umbrella there are two then amongst those Victorian chimney pots and then they are flying the mail into the post box this is a triumph of design in my estimation this was I guess the carnival the next a popular year with Aladdin's lamp and then there is more popular with them bringing the Christmas tree home etc and then British cathedrals this would be the religious one ok now we have a series of ordinary British stamps this was fireworks they actually built these things and then set them off and then photograph them and then here they are on stamps this was British photography they chose this fellow who specialized in flowers and as soon as I saw these I knew what I would do and there is a bumblebee you can see that in the cancellation this is British toys and again most of these are cancelled in Edinburgh and this is a favorite the anniversary of the Greenwich Meridian you can see where it is in the cancellation 3 feet bla bla bla 57 degrees west is going through the telescope in the second one is going through the building in the third one is going through the city on the map of Britain and in the last one it is circling the globe and I thought that my design was ok but if I could do that now I would have the red line going from the bottom out of the page I didn't have that awareness when this came out but I think this the stamps are a triumph of design some of you will remember this it's Halley's Comet as the comet used to be depicted on historic manuscripts there it is in the cancellation and these were designed by Ralph Steadman one of the quirkiest designers in the profession and if some of you can remember his book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas you will remember what his work looks like these originals were 3 feet long and they were reduced to postage stamp size and as soon as I saw it I knew what I would do it is commemorating Isaac Newton and there is the apple falling in the cancellation and the first design by a young woman I don't remember her name she submitted that and they accepted her and she designed the whole series in each one there is also a title of one of his scientific works Brilliant hardly describes how I feel about that this is another this is a famous maritime clock by John Harrison the first one is the face of the clock the second one when you remove the face this is what's underneath the next one is what's underneath that and the bottom one is the base and I don't think that I would would I think of this today I don't know this is one of my favorites this is Kew Gardens in England in 1990 and so these were stateless watercolor pencils where I would just maneuver the tip of the pencil until I made it ink like I would feed it through my pen nib and fill in the shapes down below and they have these exotic colors like the pink and the lavender which is in the stamps did I know that yes I did know that because I saw it the stamp bulletin that Britain sends out is in color at least it was at that time I don't know now but I would think so because I still get the bulletin from Australia every four months I get the one from Belgium and Luxembourg and can't not Canada anymore but almost so I do know what's coming out and I see it I think this is one of the most exciting issues of all time this is King Arthur and you can see the Holy Grail in the cancellation what a remarkable way to depict that so you can read on each one on the left what they are Gala had my tight face Guinevere and Lancelot that's poor whatever her name is the movie who got involved with that Italian guy Vanessa Redgrave there we go okay the lady of the lake is the next one and then there is Lancelot Arthur himself and Merlin beautiful here's another favorite of course this is an ordinance map of the same town Hamstreet in England on the right it is antique then a later addition then still later and then there is Hamstreet as you see it today and I have brought it down into San Francisco, California okay and the cancellation will show you where it is okay this is I received the bulletin on this this is from the Oxford story it has to do with a museum in the city of Oxford and as soon as I saw those bicyclists I knew what I would do and the stamp issue I chose is from the life of Queen Victoria and you can't get any more Victorian than that there she is elderly then younger then as a young queen and then as a maiden this is Roman Britain so I knew these I saw them in the bulletin and so my lettering is what is called in historic lettering Bustofedron writing as the ox plows in the field it goes from left to right and then the next line is from right to left and then the next from reversed and then again reversed on the bottom so I did that and I thought this was a good unity okay this is the Britain calls these countries the countries of Scotland, Wales Ireland and England I thought the stamps would be large so I left all that space up there this one is the mate to it which is this and again I used the Welsh dragon down there so I thought I was not bad but they kind of didn't follow through okay this is a souvenir sheet and it was called Smiles and they repeated this more than once so you will recognize several there's the Mona Lisa in the middle down there the teddy bear on top there's Punch and Judy in the middle next to him is the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland and there's Laurel and Hardy down in the lower right okay and in the cancellation somebody is getting a pie smashed in their face okay this is in honour of the St John ambulance corps it's one of my favourites as soon as I saw this I knew what I would try to do and this is 1987 okay this is another category of which I don't have many but this is manuscripts on stamps and these are famous for Yugoslavia which is before it's split into how many countries now and I had a booklet from the British Museum which I treasure Slavonic manuscripts in the British Museum and so I was able to devise this alphabet there is now currently in the world of calligraphy a woman who is teaching workshops in this alphabet style and if you look at the information sheet I tell you which all of these are which I forget there's a Hebrew one at the right okay this is now 9 by 12 these are huge some of them I made out of Archer's paper and some of them I bought just in the stationery store because the sheet is large so there is the guy who is on the bottom in the middle of the stamp this was we missed Atlanta where are you was Olympics here it is and so there is a runner carrying the torch and this I think is the most charming stamp souvenir sheet that the poster services ever issued I kept this forever but it was only this one time because I see a reason why I'm crazy about guinea pigs anyway so you don't often see them on stamps okay you will recognize who that is again this is the souvenir sheet I also did the small envelope and this is Daffy Duck this is bigger there this is subsequently and there was also Porky Pig came out but my approach was terrible I either tore it up or threw it out or something okay the Disney corporation issued thousands of stamps in the beginning they began with Bambi Snow White and Pinocchio and all those movies and then they began doing other things and they did them for Mongolia they did them from Bhutan they did them for people who have no idea who Disney was no never ever saw a movie but they did them but this one is dear to my heart the stamp, the souvenir sheet on the right is goofy stepping out of the space capital and slipping on a banana field and if that isn't me then nothing is okay I sympathize and that's from the Virgin Island somewhere okay this is from San Francisco it was triangular which is unusual for the US I don't know if it was our first triangular stamp I forget but down opposite this building underground is Brooks Hall which some of you will remember was an exhibition hall no longer and this expo was held down there and so you could bring your stamp to the counter they would cancel it where you wished and they had these four different cancellations so that was one design I did I also did it this way and I did it also on small envelopes and I loved this issue I thought it was beautiful they should have kept it forever this is not so long ago I don't know how many it was quite popular okay this is from Rome and I had this information so I bought a 9x12 envelope and sent it off and to my astonishment everything fit to the millimeter and I never would have expected that I was very lucky and very pleased but if you will see after the end on my name somebody local wrote the figure 5 which is my local postman okay this is personally very dear to the heart of my son Stephen and myself this is the miraculous infant of Prague when he was a child some of you will remember that dashboard figurines were very popular I haven't seen one in years but there was Jesus there was the Virgin Mary there was St. Michael against the enemy the devil of course and we had several figures of the miraculous image of Prague so I knew I had to do this I made it as formal as I could and as a videographer Stephen once he had a gig photographing in Prague I said go see the image so he went and he came back to me with miniatures with a polo shirt with the emblem with a book showing the costume that the image wears every religious holiday and more I was overwhelmed but it was very dear to our hearts and I know that every time he saw one he would think of me and the reverse was also true okay here we go this is something like 5 by 8 inches or more and this is a first day cover between Sweden on the left America on the top right and Finland on the bottom and the three cancellations are here and on the left you will recognize Jenny Lind in the middle and Charles Lindberg I don't know why he's there but there is a connection okay this is the Pitcairn Islands I think it's under the jurisdiction of Chile and the writing below in my text is an alphabet that I copied from Mark Van Stone some of you will remember that name he had sent me something like this in Texas or wherever he was he's gone into the Mayan alphabet subsequently but his writing looked like this and so does mine and this is Sweden and the circus and because that acrobat in the middle is upside down so is my A and there's a trapezius she's above the horse I see on the right and there's a seal balancing balls cancellation okay this is if you look on the block on the right you will see a banana and I believe this is the first of the stamps that were produced as shapes instead of square as a postage stamp and so I wanted this desperately and there it is and if I had to do this now instead of a pineapple down there why did I not have a banana I have no idea it may have been a time thing get it in the mail while you still have time so I want to thank you all for being here I am very grateful because this is the last one and now in the neighboring Ireland I land they are harvesting Fiji water for you and we leave as you hear the ukuleles strumming in the distance and the pimes, palms swaying and Dorothy Limour is jumping into a volcano and Clark Gable is rushing to save her and the happy natives are dancing on the shore this is the end thank you