Add & Passes

Mim sent this add & pass booklet, started by Jon Foster.

Let's talk about add & passes.  I love add & passes, but I think they've developed a bad reputation.  Don't get me wrong, there is still a large population of add & passers.  (I say large, but I'm pulling information out of my ass because that's the way it seems to me.)  I was thrilled to receive this particular one because it's 5x7.5 inches.  Most of them these days seem to be very small, and with the price of postage that makes sense to me.  I do enjoy those, but when I get my hands on something larger, I get happy.  Send me a full size journal/book and I'll be your friend forever!  Anyone remember the 1,000 journal project, and then 1,001 Journals?  

Full size traveling art journals used to be more common.  Sure, sometimes they would disappear into the void.  Someone would forget or just decide they didn't want to contribute and didn't bother to put it back in the mail, lots of different scenarios, some rude and some innocent.  That was part of the excitement.  Is this journal going to make it home, will it be full, and if it does make it home, when?  Someone could put it in their to do pile and life gets in the way.  They end up moving and the journal gets packed up.  Traveling art journals have turned up months after they were originally sent out, sometimes years.  You just never know.  I left two journals out in the wild (aka park bench) with instructions to add art and leave it for someone else, and send it home to me when full.  Chances are I will never see those journals again, but it's not impossible.  To me, that's fun.

Stepping away from the topic of traveling art journals, because I think the biggest issue is the postage involved.  Getting back to the small add & passes.  Technically they're all add & passes; you're adding to it and passing it along.  But for the sake of differentiating between them, let's say there are three different types of add & passes, the little add & pass booklets, the traveling art journals, and the one pagers (which I'm getting to now).  So, why do I say add & passes have developed a bad reputation?  I'm going to be as delicate as I can, and if you know me then you know that's not helpful.  Walking on egg shells is not my forte, so let me apologize ahead of time.  It's truly not my intention to ruffles feathers, and I understand there are people who enjoy the one sheet add & passes that have been put through a copier hundreds of times.  I do mail art, so believe me when I say I understand what it is to have a passion that other people don't get.

I've had conversations with enough people, who don't like add & passes, to believe it's those one sheet copies that have tainted their opinions.  The conversations usually end up with me trying to explain the difference between those and a booklets.  With those one pagers, you generally add a very small rubber stamp, sticker, or doodle in an empty spot on the sheet of paper.  Many people just slap on their address label and send it on.  The booklets are more like mini art journals.  Each artist creates art on a whole page then passes it on.  They're both called add & passes, but they're handled differently.  But, very often when the subject comes up, those one pagers are what people think of.  I'm not the only one who runs into this.  I've read threads on various message boards with similar conversations.

People get so annoyed with these one sheet copies that they write on them, something like 'I don't do these, stop sending them to me'.  I've seen this often.  

When I find one of these in my mailbox, I will admit to rolling my eyes, but I do add to it.  However, I won't waste a postage stamp for it.  I wait and send it along with other art I'm sending out, first being sure the person I'm sending to is fine with receiving it.

To sum it up, what I'm saying is there's nothing wrong with those one pagers, if that's what you're into, but a lot of people do find them a nuisance, and that is what pops into their heads when they hear the term add & pass.  It's too bad because contributing to a traveling art journal, whether it's a large book or a tiny booklet, is artistically fulfilling.

Note: Everything stated in this blog post is my own opinion.  I understand not everyone will see this topic the same way as I do, and that's fine.  I enjoy a good healthy discussion, sans any rudeness. 😁