The Unaltered Post Office- A Zine

This zine came about on the fateful day when the post mistress saw a mouse in the back room of our little post office.

Being squeamish, she gratefully took my offer to do some cleaning, purging old files and moving the bins of new files into the file cabinets where they belonged. And hopefully displacing a mouse or two in the process. You can imagine my excitement at having the opportunity to excavate old papers and such!

This zine is 99% printed on discarded postal forms (almost everything is done on-line now).


I started a page with a "stamp collection" of vintage and current postal impressions, to encourage the recipients to continue the collection in other post offices. I plan to take my personal copy around to the local post offices here and get their cancelations. Kind of like a passport.



And, of course, there is a goody envelope, containing some of my vast collection of vintage postage and some placards that I pull daily from the mail bags and bins as I sort mail.

I made rubbings of the brass signs that used to mark mail slots in the post office. Now we have "up to date" plastic ones (ick!) and the lovely brass plates are entombed in a file cabinet in the back room. I think I'm the only one who knows they exist. Well, now you know too.

There are still balls of twine stored in a cabinet, back when string was used for securing parcels. I enclosed a sample.

On the last page I made a pocket from a blurb I copied and altered from an in-house publication about the history of the postal service. Seems post masters were once the pillars of their community...

The pocket contains a vintage postcard, suitable for altering, and a couple pieces of yellowed ephemera, from the back room of course. No, they aren't yellowed from mouse urine.

I draw the line there!