RMW Ramblings

 Post Offices Past Some once small communities bordering Wilmington once had their own post offices and postal addresses. The Highlands, now a Wilmington neighborhood, was once a separate community with its own post office. Here is an 1886 envelope postmarked from Highlands from Joseph Bancroft & Sons Co. to Pusey & Jones Co. from 1886. Our own Highlands. house was built around 1882. Notice that neither businesses required a street address.   Several years back the Montchanin Post Office left their old train station location in Montchanin and relocated in Breck's Mill along the Brandywine in the old community Henry Clay. Montchanin is a PO Box only station with its own zip code but no delivery area. From 1851 to 1924 Henry Clay had its own Post Office. Here's an envelope postmarked August 27, 1914 from Henry Clay .  Highlands became part of Wilmington early in the 20th century.  Henry Clay remains just outside the Wilmington city limits and is p...

  The Mystery of Ruth Belew And the Dell Mapbacks   As a kid in the 1940’s I was fascinated by the piles of paperback mysteries that sat around my grandmother’s cottage.   I poured over them in the flickering yellow light of the “coal-oil” (kerosene) lamp   while playing Hot Pretzels or The Pennsylvania Polka   on the crank-up Victrola.    I studied them carefully, but I wasn’t reading the stories.   Instead I was fascinated with the covers.   Specifically the back covers.   The mysteries   were 25¢ Dell paperbacks, those we know today as “mapbacks.”       Over the years I have accumulated two dozen or so of these graphic design classics.   They were produced from 1943 to 1953.   They had a style all their own.   Dell Books was a venture of George Delacourte, a New York publisher, and Lloyd Smith of Western Printing and Lithography in Racine, Wisconsin.   (Much of this information comes...