Tanner Herriot's Stamps
Editor’s Note: Oklahomans are prone to collecting. Nestled at an intersection before we were flown over, Route 66, Interstates 35 and 40, and, in centuries past, the waterways connecting the continent’s indigenous tribes have provided opportunities for items stored in boxes and bags to congregate in the nation’s heartland. Sometimes they’re organized by type or age. Sometimes they haphazardly fill walls and surfaces, manifesting the maximalist’s daydream. In a land whose weather routinely turns against its people, collections evidence our presence and care. They tell our stories, often with a hidden honesty. This article marks the beginning of an ongoing, intermittent series, entitled Collectables, about people who collect culinary cultural ephemera.
Tanner Herriot has over 1,500 stamps. Not the postage kind. The logo and crafty language lovingly pressed in ink on a hipster coffee shop’s plain white paper cup kind. But, instead of keeping 1,500 cups, Tanner keeps notebooks. He first noticed stamps in 2008 while grabbing a cup of coffee at OKC’s Coffee Slingers. Curiosity quickly grew into fascination. “I really get into these small independent shops that have fantastic art and there is character to what they’re doing,” he reflects.
Now, he organizes his travel so he can stop by a coffee shop or other business with a stamp he’s been eyeing and asks for an addition to his notebook’s next empty space. Once a notebook is filled, it gets shrink wrapped and stored to protect it from water. He catalogs each stamp in a spreadsheet that allows him to search by type, business, location, etc. The notebooks serve as a record, a logographic system, of his efforts and, by extension, his life.
Like the first piece in a collection, a stamp represents triumphant arrival for an independent coffee shop. It’s a punk rock, counterculture mentality. Small business owners make the most with what they have and what’s cheap. For the small coffee shop that can’t buy and store 10,000 screen printed cups, that’s a white paper cup hand-stamped in black ink. Tanner captures the essence of the cup in a documentary project on the world of stamps. This work in progress is a passion project that includes snippets like the following: “The first time I stamped a cup with our logo on it was one of the most memorable moments I had as a small business owner,” from Guthrie’s Hoboken Coffee Roasters owner Trey Woods, and “Seeing your brand in the wild held by somebody you don’t know is very close to holding your first child,” from OKC’s Woodshed Coffee and Tea and TMRW Coffee owner Sam DuRegger.
An Oklahoman by birth and a cinematographer by trade, Tanner honed his skills in NYC before moving back to Oklahoma City early in the pandemic. It gave him a moment to pause. Upon restarting his professional work, he renewed his dedication to telling the stories of people who make, use, and obsess over stamps. In a Morrisettean twist of fate, Tanner recently developed a caffeine sensitivity. “So much of my life is spent in coffee shops. Now I freak out when I drink it.” Luckily, his collecting doesn’t stop with third wave, hipster coffee shops.
Tanner goes wherever the stamps take him: a deli in Columbus, OH, tracking down a unique stamp through multiple stops in Nashville, a stamp manufacturer in NYC, a stamp collectors conference, San Francisco, Portland, OR, and in the hopefully near future, Europe, Australia, and Japan. National park entry stamps, Japanese train station stamps, and the forged passport stamps that allowed Jews to escape fascist occupations are on the list. To Tanner, each stamp represents a person or community’s effort to make themselves known and shows how they relate to the world.
You can find the documentary trailer at rubberstampdoc.com and the rest of Tanner Herriot’s work at his website, tannerherriott.com.
Do you have a food related collection that you want to share with us? Send a note to editor@edibleokc.com or connect with us on social media. We’re @edibleokc.
