Fan mail

During a stop at Barnes and Noble this afternoon, I happened to pick up Paul Grushkin's The Very Best Dead Letters, a sleek and appealing collection of hundreds of the most striking envelopes sent, over the years, to the Grateful Dead. That may sound like a relatively small artistic niche, but given that the Dead pioneered a mail order ticket purchasing system decades ago, Grushkin actually enjoyed an embarrassing richness of choice: indeed, more than 15,000 of the letters are stored in an archive at UC Santa Cruz. And given, moreover, that the band's legions of fans tended towards the colorfully creative, many of them are deeply enjoyable: the book, in fact, is a parade of intricate (and often psychedelic) renderings of bears, skulls, and buses. It's the visual record, you might say, of a proud and enthusiastic but hardly exclusive club.

Few bands manage their own ticket business these days, and few have developed an iconography as rich as that of the Dead. But that doesn't mean that they don't still rake in the interesting envelope, from time to time. As Exhibit A, I'll offer the manila sample, above. In love, still, with Milkshake (though her fervor has cooled into a solid, comfortable commitment), and now in love as well with the expressive possibilities of Valentine's Day and written English, Cleo boldly announced the contents of an envelope sent to Lisa, the lead singer of the local kids' band. We enjoyed helping her spell the words; I assume Lisa will smile when she sees it. And I hope that perhaps you'll enjoy it, too.