I have the vague memory of a magazine (it might have been the popular science monthly Omni) that ran a contest in which readers were invited to creatively address a letter and mail it to the magazine via the USPS. The most creative letter that actually got delivered would win, probably something like a free annual subscription, it was mostly for fun. There were some clever entries that worked. They only did it once because the Post Office wasn’t happy.
Anyone else remember this?
I believe it was GAMES that did this. Envelope of the Month.
Not what the OP is asking for, but I recall an issue of Mad magazine in the 1970s that published a letter from one its readers. The envelope was addressed with only a picture of Alfred E. Neumann and the magazine’s ZIP code. Someone at the post office must have had a sense of humor, since as I recall it was delivered with no further markings by the postal service.
I hope someone here can dig up exactly which issue it was.
Why wouldn’t the Post Office be happy, though?
Some of the envelopes were hard to read, and it took them some effort to work out where the senders wanted them to go.
I may not be remembering this part correctly though.
I think that’s it! Thanks
Also in the 1970’s, I was living in a sort of commune on a back road some miles outside a small town. I went to visit my parents, and while there, sent a postcard addressed to:
All Those Weird Folks Out Past The Mitchells
[Smalltown, State, Zip code.]
It got there. I doubt you could pull that off these days.
My favorite story of this type, which may be apocryphal, involves Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! which (as I remember it) once ran an article about the odd ways that people addressed mail to it. One of the letters they received had no printed address, just a large rip in the envelope.
The Post Office got so tired of trying to interpret these weird addresses that they made a regulation to the effect that envelopes which were not properly addressed to Ripley’s would be returned to the sender. So somebody pasted a printed copy of the regulation to an envelope.
It was delivered to Ripley’s.
You’re welcome! Glad I could help.
Some of those envelopes were true works of art, or so my memory says.
I don’t know anybody in real life who had a subscription to GAMES, except my family and the person who gave me my first subscription. I’m happy to see there are others who remember it.
When cleaning out my apartment several years ago, I found a dozen or so copies of Games Magazine from the 1980s. I’m checking with the moderators whether it’s acceptable to post scans of some of the Envelopes of the Month.
Received quick approval to post links to a few of the envelopes. Will do so later today (it’s 1:30 AM for me right now).
Here are some envelopes from GAMES Magazine:
(Click on the picture to see all envelopes.)
Cool, thanks!
I was a long-time subscriber to GAMES; I can’t say for sure if I read it from the beginning, but it was close.
The back issues from 40 years ago are still a good read today. It’s somewhat strange, though, to see ads for cigarettes and distilled alcohol.
I subscribed to GAMES for years and years. At one point I had a stack of back issues with puzzles I meant to get to … someday.
When I retired I had a stack of unfinished back issues (along with a stack of puzzle pages from the Chicago Tribune Magazine) which I finally had time to catch up on.
I had one from the mid-1980s until it folded, and then renewed it when Kappa Publishing took it over from Playboy (and still have a subscription to Games World of Puzzles, which had parts of Games folded into it, although I miss the letter columns), although I switched to an online subscription last year. I even got a Games T-shirt once, and probably would have gotten a second one except that the mistake I saw was so obvious (it was a chess problem where the “solution” was to promote a pawn to a piece of the opponent’s color, which is not allowed under either FIDE or USCF rules), yet the mistake was never mentioned in the magazine so I am assuming nobody pointed it out) that I figured that somebody had already reported it.
