Geof Huth has been a most prolific postcard sender to me over the years, and I like to think I’ve returned the favor. He asserted once that I send him a card every four days or so, but I don’t believe it has been quite that often, though there have been occasions when I send him a card each day from some trip or other. That’s something that usually lasts only a week or less.

I got a card from Geof yesterday. For the moment, it is the newest in a very long line.

Nice. Made from found cardboard, hand drawn, imparting some information, and most likely unique in the history of humanity. Some of his cards have much more elaborate drawings, which he calls glyphs — if I remember right — though I’ve never asked for a precise definition of the term, and probably don’t need to. Some things exist beyond the boundaries of precision, and are no worse for it.

One of these days, maybe, I will post a collection of Huthian postcard glyphs, since they are quite remarkable graphic expressions. I’ve posted cards sporting a few over the years, including a particularly colorful, messy, exact, crayoned, inked & impressed one with a collection of letters and letter-like entities, but I don’t have the energy for kind of project right now. Sorting postcards is it.

During my postcard sorting, I came across what may be the first card he ever sent me. Geof’s father was in the Foreign Service, so he (Geof) would spend time in far-off locations during our college years, at least during the summers, and this came to me from Switzerland during the fantastic plastic summer of ’82.

I checked, pulling at the edge of one of the stickers, and after more than 40 years it would still be possible to remove them and stick them on something else. An example of Swiss adhesive prowess, I suppose. But I have no intention of doing so.

It’s possible I received something from him earlier, but I’m not sure how likely. I wouldn’t have known him well enough, or at all, the previous summer, since we probably met at some point that year (ca. 1981, let’s say) because of our mutual loose affiliation with the VU student magazine Versus.

I was in summer school at VU in ’82. I made no note of receiving the card in the diary I kept that summer, which presumably would have been toward the end of the month. I didn’t make many specific entries attached to specific days that month anyway – I was out to smash the diary paradigm or something. So that summer mostly exists beyond the boundaries of precision, but that doesn’t keep me from smiling when I think about it.