A fragment of an envelope: how much could it tell you about where it was found or who it belonged to?
Chief craftsman Andrew McLynn was renovating the Bell House windows, using traditional techniques to restore them to their original splendour.
While taking apart one of the box sashes Andrew found part of an envelope stuffed inside the window frame, probably by someone repairing the window who needed to fill the gap and picked up some nearby wastepaper. Printed on it are the words:
needs you…
Now with
extra pages
and only 85p!
If undelivered, please return to
Games Workshop27/29 Sunbeam Road, London NW10 6JP
(characters in italics are our interpolations due to letters being missing or illegible)
We can see that the envelope was posted by Games Workshop and it would almost certainly have carried their in-house magazine, White Dwarf, which at the time covered fantasy and science fiction role-playing games, in particular ‘Advanced Dungeons & Dragons’ (referred to as AD&D on the magazine cover below). White Dwarf increased its cover price to 85p in April 1984 so our envelope would have been sent out after that as it refers to the cover price being ‘only 85p’.
The envelope is addressed to A. Creed. He was a pupil at Dulwich College from 1984 to 1988. Boys at boarding at school would of course have their mail sent to their school address and it’s not surprising that one of them would want to read a magazine such as this one. Was Creed delighted to read his magazine on the day it arrived, or did he squirrel it away to enjoy at the weekend when he had more time? Perhaps he passed it around Bell House after he had read it, so that boys not lucky enough to have a subscription might also enjoy reading about the latest games.