January-March 2024 Archive

9 February 2024

New Year, New Tattoo

Many thanks to Steph Duchesne for her amazing work.

28 January 2024

Bundle Labels: Much Ado About Mail

Dedicated to Andrew Filer, who I think would have gotten a kick out of this.

On cold winter weekends, there's nothing I like better than browsing the Lakehead University Library...and looking for the unexpected.

Take the periodical above. Despite being in a Canadian library, it unexpectedly bears a mailing label addressed to Nashville, Tennessee. And that bright orange sticker with the letter "S?" That's an unexpected artifact from the U.S. Mail.

In the late 1960s, the U.S. Post Office used paper facing slips to identify bundles of presorted mail destined for specific locations. In the 1970s, these were replaced by adhesive labels bearing cryptic letter and number codes. Fast-forward to the 1990s: My family handled mailings for an organization...and I was cast into a role of remembering what a red "D" or orange "S" was as we dropped bundles of newsletters into the mail.

USPS, 1981.

With latent memories awakened, I found a 2016 article by Tony Wawrukiewicz (R.I.P.) explaining the history of the bundle labels. After digging around the deep corners of the Internet for further research, I think I've finally cracked the code and pieced together a full chronology:

At least eight different labels were used for different sorting classes (shown above in decreasing order of granularity), although not all of them were in use at the same time:

• Firm, for mail destined for a specific address.
• Carrier Route, for ZIP code subdivisions (including postal spam addressed to "Boxholder" on a specific road...ask how I know).
• Direct, for specific 5-digit ZIP codes.
• Mixed City, for large municipalities spanning multiple ZIP codes. (I spent most of my life in places where towns and ZIP codes had a one-for-one correlation, so I never saw this one back in the day.)
• Sectional Centre Facility, for 3-digit ZIP code groups.
• Area Distribution Centre. This one emerged in the early 1980s and may have briefly replaced the SCF label outright, then existed alongside it after consolidation resulted in ADCs spanning more than one 3-digit ZIP code group (and sometimes, more than one state).
• State, which came to an end following USPS "classification reform" in 1996.
• Mixed States, later Mixed ADC, a catch-all for the scraps left over when other sorting was done.

Has Canada Post ever done anything similar to this? As far as I know...no. Though Canada's post office does have its own analogous presort groupings (including a catch-all called "residue"), the Commercial Mail Customer Guide reveals that their prescribed way of labelling them is with paper facing slips...like it was for the USPS prior to the mid-1970s. No colour stickers for you!

13 January 2024

Andrew Filer (1980-2021)

This was Andrew Filer. He was a friend of mine.

He died two years ago. He was only 40. I only found this out this week, and now I feel like shit. :'-(

Andrew was originally from northern Minnesota, and had an encyclopedic knowledge about the little quirks of the area. He was excited when I moved to Thunder Bay, and encouraged me to visit the Hoito...which is also now gone.

How do I remember him? He was "super gay," out and proud, and had an unbridled passion and enthusiasm for the geekiest things.

How geeky? He travelled to South Africa just to track down a 1970s road sign manual in a library. He had a plan to restore a vintage character generator and use it on a YouTube channel showcasing obscure books.

We almost met face-to-face once, while he was travelling through his old stomping grounds and made a stop in Duluth. Unfortunately this happened when the pandemic was in full swing, and the border was locked tight...so it was not to be.

Sadly, he and I drifted out of touch in his final months. I had withdrawn from Flickr and Twitter, putting me out of reach of his daily interaction. That left text messages as our primary fallback...and he wasn't much of a texter. Add the blur of life and work...and the next thing I know, he's been gone for two years, I'm the last one to find out, and I'm reeling from the shock.

Now I wish I had reached out to him some more. Called him up in 2021, braved the border...done anything. I wish I could listen to him wax poetic about city lots, 1970s typography, or the joys of "exciting books" one more time. I wish...I could turn back time.

The image above was his personal Facebook photo. Knowing him, he made it small and pixelated on purpose.