Dear Everyone ~

I love to send mail, and I love to receive mail.
What makes both of these passionate pastimes
possible is … the United States Postal Service.
The USPS does a brilliant job of moving the mail.
And now it is being held hostage in budget warfare in
Washington. I’ll skip the statistics & the politics
and say that several campaigns are afoot to support,
meaning to fully fund, the USPS. One involves sending letters
to your US Senators. I’ve just done it, and I’ll show you
my envelopes below. But, first, let me tell you
how I found out about this campaign.

The envelopes above are the handiwork of Linda Smith
in San Francisco. She shared the link to the campaign
with her friend Alyson Kuhn, who shared it with me.
Linda is a customer of long-standing, but we haven’t really
corresponded. When I asked about her letter-writing activities,
she e’d me in excellent detail:

“ As an inveterate letter writer since my girlhood days,
when my grandmother sent missives from her California
trips back to me in the Midwest, I have been a huge fan of mail,
postage stamps, and the United States Postal Service. Recently
I began receiving emails about the possible demise of the USPS
and promptly signed various petitions. So when the request came
to write handwritten letters to my Senators in D.C., I was more
than happy to pick up my LePens from you, write my letters,
and then stamp the letters with appropriate vintage postage,
also purchased from you. Two of the stamps on each envelope
celebrate 200 years of postal service!
And then I forwarded that email request for handwritten
letters to another mail maven, my friend Alyson Kuhn.
I’m so glad I did, because it turned out she hadn’t acted on it! ”

Alyson Kuhn, who also lives in California,
promptly sent letters to her Senators, and posted the photo
above on Instagram and Facebook. Michael Ball, a stamp dealer
pal of hers, commented that the P.S. Write Soon stamp
(from 1980) would also have been appropriate. Alyson
commented back that the From Me to You stamp
(designed by Michael Osborne, issued in 2015)
might have been the perfect single stamp for these missives.

Alyson is so fond of these that she keeps an entire
press sheet of them, six panes that haven’t been die-cut apart,
on her office door. She loves to peel a stamp off whenever
she is in the mood to part with one. She says it’s like a stamp bar!
And she adds that the stickers on the sheet (an enchanting
USPS innovation!) would have been ideal to illustrate
or punctuate the points in her letters.

To get my “postal passion” flowing,
I contemplated the stamps for my pair of envelopes.
I was delighted to have so many thematic options.

And I decided to write on Bari Zaki Studio letterhead,
as a purveyor of epistolary supplies. I hope the mail carriers
who deliver to the Hart Senate Office Building will have
sacks and stacks of USPS-fanmail for the Senators.
If you would like to add your two envelopes’
worth to the campaign, here’s the link … and the sooner the better!

Save The Post Office!

Lobbying from the studio, Bari