It was typed by electric typewriter on airmail paper, 14 copies at a time (the last "nearly unreadable").
By early 1964, the two men were discussing the paper they would use: it would be "a fairly scrappy-looking thing", on airmail paper to keep the costs down, and they would send a free copy to all poets.
Highlights include a gleaming grid of store-bought boxes, each wrapped in aluminum-foil duct tape, by Mr. Feher; brightly painted small boxes inside old wooden boxes, by Ms. Shaver; a pair of nearly invisible watercolors on airmail stationery, by Mr. Tuttle; and, by Mr. Herrera, an expansive, cut-paper work that appears to abstract a scene from a Walt Disney cartoon (Johnson).
Occasionally, despite my best efforts, a shred of his inextinguishable past turns up to tease me: a page of one of his typed letters on flimsy airmail paper, for instance, advising me of some crazy scheme he wants me to "bring to the Attention of your Advisors with a View to Early Investment".
Go on!" There was airmail from Cologne: "Liebe Amerikaner," and "We cancelled our party, and we wish you success (in rescuing people)... Und would be happy, if you do drawings or write us letters".
For a time, part of the issue was produced on thin airmail paper, which took even longer.It was reckoned that rotary-press printing would begin to pay with a print order of 6,000 or 7,000, and, painfully, the circulation got there.
On the 97p stamps (for small items of airmail to Europe) are portraits of leaders from the 18th and 19th centuries: William Pitt the Younger, Charles Grey, Robert Peel and William Gladstone.
Some of Kusama's collages initially made me laugh – row upon row of airmail stickers and postage stamps – before their sadness hit me: alone on an alien continent for years, nothing linked her to home but letters.
The consistently high costs of airmail curtailed this trend after the war.
The novel excels in detail, and in particular in the details of the letters: "Most are written on lightweight, self‑sealing airmail letter cards, some bearing the flat-rate threepenny stamp, with several showing burn marks or damp staining".
In June 1961, it was honored as one of the twelve most significant aircraft of all time by Popular Mechanics and it was featured on a USPS airmail stamp issued in 1985.
