Every time you get a bill in the mail (well, nearly every time) or when you get yet another credit card offer, there is a reply envelope inside. It may be a BRE – Business Reply Envelope – where the company providing it pays the postage, or a CRE – Courtesy Reply Envelope on which you get to put a stamp.

Either way it takes two envelopes to complete the transaction – one coming, one going. And more than 80 billion reply envelopes are sent through the mail each year. That’s a lot of paper! The USPS has now approved a line of re-usable (“round-trip?”) envelopes manufactured by ecoEnvelopes, a company out of Stillwater, Minnesota. (Read the article)

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In the ’80s I did a stint with the US Postal Service and got to see exactly how mail is processed from beginning to end. Like laws and sausages, you don’t want to really know how things work inside the USPS. According to Wikipedia, Otto von Bismark (1815-1898) said something to the effect of, “To retain respect for sausages and laws, one must not watch them in the making.” Somewhat the same philosophy applies to mail delivery.

Actually, I consider it a modern miracle that so much is delivered with little to no fanfare, and so few pieces actually go astray. You try keeping track of tens of millions of pieces of mail in transit at a time!

(Read the article)

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Documents have been my focus for nearly two decades – their creation, distribution, and use. These paper sculptures are not “documents” in the traditional sense and have no printed text on them; however they are certainly a form of communication!

Peter Callesen, paper sculptor, takes a sheet of paper and turns it into a 3-dimensional sculpture that reflects its previous 2-dimensionality. (Read the article)

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