Looking for William Rowe…
I frequent library used bookstores looking for materials to recycle into collages. A few months ago I found “Surreal Stickers & Unreal Stamps (224 Full-Color Lables Gummed and Perforated)” by William Rowe. Published in either 1982 (according to the inside cover) or 1983 (according to the back) this thin magazine sized paperback contains 8 single-sided pages of lickable postage stamp-type stickers.
They’re beautiful, wouldn’t you agree? Also, I think the book itself is kind of rare - not RARE - you can find copies of it on ebay easily enough, but it hasn’t been reprinted since it’s original run. I’ll probably never actually use these stickers in my art, at least until I learn more about their elusive creator. Aside from this collection and a couple books of pre-made postcards, I haven’t found much else from their creator. I’ve written to Dover Press and haven’t heard back.
Dover is well known and loved by collage artists for their books of clip-art, which through the end of the 1990s were one of the best ways to get legally reusable images. With the advent of easily accessible copy machines in the 1980s, manipulating and repurposing vintage spot illustrations provided us with a readymade codified language for our compositions. To me, it isn’t a far stretch to say xerox machines affected/influenced collage and correspondence art as much as photography impacted modern art.
Who is William Rowe and what inspired this book of stamps? There is only one fact I know about Rowe, and one other piece of info I’m pretty sure of at the time of this writing: 1. He wrote or edited a lot of clip art books for Dover from the 1970s through the 1980s and 2, I’m confident that he participated in mail art campaigns.
Imagine being a collage maker who also worked at the ‘Library of Alexandria’ organizing and codifying texts so they could be gifted to the next generation. The chuckle Rowe might have given while waxing down images that would become a page in a book that would someday be copied/cut/remixed to create new art that he’d might later receive in a future exchange of correspondence art!
Aside from those leads, I haven’t found any confirming information about the artist, but I have managed to eliminate some suspects:
He is not a William Rowe (1910-1955) landscape painter and muralist from Buffalo NY.
His is not Bill Rowe who played with Krazee Ken, and The Gizmos and was part of the Boston music scene back in the 1970s.
As far as I can tell he is not the William “Brit” Rowe who is a Professor of Art & Design at Ohio Northern University. I’m currently waiting for an email back to find out if he may be related.
Dover Press has been sold a handful of times since the early 1990s, and that means their institutional memory has most likely been wiped clean, sadly. Being that he was involved in the mail art community in the pre-internet era however has me convinced there are plenty of people who received his letters, and collections both institutional and personal that contain his correspondence. They’re probably just not online and never will be.
I like Rowe’s artwork, it pops with colorful fun, anarchic deconstruction, and insists that there’s so much more to find beyond the edges of each stamp. The existence of a book of pre-made mail art accouterments from an otherwise conservative publishing house is so odd that I want to know how it came about. And the chance to learn something that isn’t at the tip of my fingers is compelling too. It’s something to discover new ‘biographical stamps’, and to connect in a creative [if not tangible] way with his clan of makers and mailers.
Do you know anything about William Rowe? ARE you William Rowe?
Reach out, I’d love to learn about the artist and see more of their work.
