The Coffee Table Book of Mail Art: the Intimate Letters of JP Jacob, 1981-1987
The Coffee Table Book of Mail Art: the Intimate Letters of JP Jacob, 1981-1987
PostHype was discontinued in 1985. A promised new periodical, to be titled Occasional Correspondence, never materialized.
In 1987, for his contribution to John Held, Jr.’s Annotated Bibliography of Mail Art, Jacob self-published The Coffee Table Book of Mail Art: The Intimate Letters of J.P. Jacob. It was his self-proclaimed withdrawal from the mail art network. With an advertisement declaring “Each copy contains a valuable original artwork by a famous mail artist!!” Jacob gave away original works from his mail art collection to all recipients of the publication.
The Coffee Table Book of Mail Art: The Intimate Letters of J.P. Jacob 1981 – 1987
Contributors (inadvertent and otherwise):
Harley Francis
Henryk Gajewski
Piotr Rypson
Volker Hamann
Dana Friis-Hansen
Dr. Ronnie Cohen
Lon Spiegelman
Peter Meyer
Chuck Welch
Ray Johnson
Greil Marcus
Ryosuke Cohen
Anna Banana
Bern Porter
Gunther Ruch
Jon Held, Jr.
PostHype was founded in 1981. The first issue was created, using pressed Letraset on paper, as a birthday gift to the artist Steven Durland, and modeled on his satirical mini-magazine Tacit. Early issues of PostHype were printed with an original rubber stamp, hand carved from photographs made using the photobooth machine at the Times Square arcade known as Playland, which recorded the visits of friends and other mail artists to New York City. Later issues expanded to document Jacob’s mail art activities.
Riding Beggar ceased publication in the 1990s. A complete run of PostHype was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in 1987. Incomplete sets are held by the Getty Research Institute (acquired with the Jean Brown, Bern Porter, Carlo Pittore, and other people’s papers) and active mail art archives such as the Artpool Art Research Center.
The Riding Beggar archive is housed with the John P. Jacob Papers at the Beinecke Rare Books Library, Yale University.
