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Molly Rausch takes classic postage stamps and imagines the scenes that lay beyond their limited scope. She begins by pasting the stamp on paper and then adding watercolors and gouaches. Rausch does no research on the stamps, so her works are exercises in pure speculation (as the flying saucer over the White House suggests).
If you take a look at a catalog of tools for a specialized craft, you might be amazed at the vast number of specialized pieces of equipment available that you’ve never heard of. This tool, for example, is a perforation gauge. It’s used by stamp collectors to measure the gaps left by tear marks in postage stamps.
Link via Swiss Miss | Photo: Harris Co.
Follow these five surefire steps and you’ll be stuck to the corner of envelopes in no time!
Step #1: KICK THE BUCKET
This is the hard part. According to the U.S. Postal Service, no living person can appear on an official stamp. No exceptions! (Clearly, the Postal Service is in the Elvis-is-dead camp).
Step #2: BE PATIENT
Don’t expect your stamps to arrive in time for your wake. The Postal Service has a rule that people can’t be honored in stamp form until five years after their death. But they do make an exception for recently deceased U.S. presidents. The USPS is willing to honor a former commander-in-chief on the first anniversary of the birthday following his death.
Step #3: CELEBRATE YOUR BIRTHDAY!
Even after you’ve been dead and buried for five years, the USPS will only issue stamps on significant anniversaries. For most personalities, that means waiting until what would have been their 100th birthday before landing the honor. Of course, what constitutes a “significant” anniversary is up for grabs. In 1993, the USPS issued an Elvis Presley stamp on what would have been the King’s 58th birthday. No one complained; more than 500 million Elvis Presley stamps were sold.
Step #4: DON’T BECOME A RABBI
Because of the whole separation-of-church-and-state thing, the USPS won’t issue stamps that commemorate “individuals whose principle achievements are associated with religious undertakings.” But the government bends this rule from time to time. When the Postal Service announced its slate of commemorative stamps for 2010, one of them featured Mother Teresa. Atheist groups blasted the stamp for its religious underpinnings, but the USPS responded that the stamp was intended to honor the nun’s humanitarian work more than her religious beliefs. Despite the controversy, the Mother Teresa stamp was officially released on September 5, 2010 -when she would have been 100 years old.
Step #5: DON’T SUCK UP TO THE COMMITTEE
Since 1957, the Postmaster General has appointed and maintained the Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee, which consists of 15 leaders from diverse fields. They meet four times a year to discuss stamp proposals, and the committee’s roster often reads like a random assemblage of folks you’d never see at the same dinner party. Past members include Academy Award winner Karl Malden, author James Michener, and Notre Dame basketball coach Digger Phelps (who served not one, but two terms on the committee, from 1983 to 2006). Phelps wrote extensively about the behind-the-scenes machinations of the group in his 2007 memoir, Undertaker’s Son: Life Lessons from a Coach. During his tenure, the committee received a deluge of 50,000 proposals a year and often felt pressure from members of Congress to approve certain stamps. Phelps wrote, “The pressure doesn’t work; if anything it turns off the committee.”
Current members of the Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Board include Jean Picker Firstenberg, former head of the American Film Institute; Joan Mondale, wife of former Vice President Walter Mondale; and Henry Louis Gates, the Harvard professor who ended up having a “beer summit” at the White House in 2009. If you wind up having a drink with Gates, don’t bring up the stamp thing.
International Diplomacy & the Postal Service
Believe it or not, the U.S. Postal Service has been issuing commemorative stamps since 1893. (The first series celebrated the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ voyage to the New World!) But the real reasons the USPS issues these stamps isn’t so much to celebrate patriotism; it’s to make money. When people collect stamps instead of using them for postage, the federal government turns a healthy profit. In 2006, the USPS estimated that 120 million Elvis stamps were never mailed, delivering more than $30 million to the Postal System’s coffers.
But not every commemorative stamp is a good idea. In 1994, the Postal Service planned to issue a stamp recognizing the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The government was trying to portray the historical event without offering a judgement on the bombing itself, but lots of people questioned its tastefulness. Japan’s foreign minister protested, as did the mayor of Nagasaki, who called the stamp “heartless.” The Japanese embassy in Washington took its case to the State Department in hopes of canceling the stamp before it was released. Eventually, protests grew so loud that the Clinton White House leaned on the USPS to ditch the stamp, and the Postal Service caved. But it held onto the theme. In 1995, the USPS replaced the mushroom cloud stamp with one depicting Harry Truman announcing the end of the war.
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The article above, written by Ethan Trex, is reprinted with permission from the Scatterbrained section of the March-April 2011 issue of mental_floss magazine. Get a subscription to mental_floss and never miss an issue!
Be sure to visit mental_floss‘ website and blog for more fun stuff!
Peter R. Mason is the “Post Pop Art Man”. He creates large images by using recycled postage stamps as pixels! Mason’s latest work is a portrait of Prince William and Kate Middleton on the occasion of the upcoming royal wedding. See portraits of world leaders and celebrities, as well as still lifes and landscapes all done in stamps at his website. Link -via the Presurfer
UK’s Royal Mail released a new set of postage stamps this week featuring famous wizards, witches, and enchanters from legend and literature. The eight stamps depict Merlin, Morgan le Fay, Aslan, the White Witch, Nanny Ogg, Rincewind, Volemort, and Dumbledore. See them all in a gallery at The Guardian. Link -via The Daily What
The world’s first adhesive postage stamps were issued by Great Britain in 1840, with the issuance of the “Penny Black” depicting Queen Victoria. Thus began the convention of designating British stamps by the depiction of the country’s sovereign. Great Britain is the only country allowed by international postal regulations to omit a text name of the issuing country, which allows artists much greater flexibility in the creation of stamp designs.
In 1966 Arnold Machin sculpted a bust of Queen Elizabeth for the Royal Mail. This “Machin head” has been in continuous use since then, and has thus been reproduced some 320 BILLION times. Three copies of the original bust were known to exist, but recently a fourth one was discovered at the Machin family home.
In October the Queen’s head will be sold to the highest bidder; it is expected to fetch £10,000.
Link. Photo: BNPS.co.uk
“This is the biggest and most adhesive honor The Simpsons has ever received,” said Matt Groening, creator and executive producer of The Simpsons.
Link -via J-Walk Blog
