The antiphilatelist
Some people collect stamps. Some people collect cancellations:
I love this. You’re not collecting a thing, not really; instead you’re collecting evidence of an act—or, maybe two acts: the physical thunk of the cancellation stamp on paper and the physical passage of the letter.
Just in case you were curious about cancellations: wow.
The source, amassblog, also has one of Paul Rand’s business cards. I keep wondering if I would think it was beautiful (I do) if it didn’t have Paul Rand’s name on it?
I got really into file marks when I was working on office technology; stamp cancellations would be a special case of these, notarization stamps might be another. Internal office marks sometimes were just abbreviations, meaning something like “OK,” “return,” “copy before sending,” “burn this copy,” “send.”
Cornelia Vismann argues that these marks are like little speech acts; they don’t just record that something has been done, they actually effect that thing into being. With documents in particular, they trigger all sorts of algorithms — think of the mailroom scenes in The Hudsucker Proxy. Actors that become the evidence of action and its legitimacy.