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When it’s slow at the circulation desk, just get out a sheet of paper and start stamping. Italian artist Federico Pietrella found that date stamps can be used effectively to create images resembling pointillist paintings.
Artist’s Website — via Colossal
Back when people sent a lot of letters and postcards through the mail, the position of a stamp could send a message of its own. The “code” became popular around 1890, after it was written up in a Hungarian newspaper. It was printed on postcards in several European languages so a correspondent could clue in a recipient for future reference. See a collection of these postcards explaining the meaning of your stamp at Poemas del río Wang. Link -via TYWKIWDBI
In 1993 the Royal Mail in Great Britain issued a set of five se-tenant stamps to honor the legendary fictional detective Sherlock Holmes. The stamps depicted iconic scenes from The Reigate Squire, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Six Napoleons, The Greek Interpreter, and The Final Problem.
Hidden within the design of each stamp is a single letter; the five letters (D, E, L, O, and Y) can be anagrammed to form a relevant word other than “yodel.” The question is whether you can locate the five letters. You will need good eyes, perhaps a magnifying glass, and a supersized image (available here – click twice). Those who are curious, but too impatient to do the searching, can avoid the fun and skip to the solution.
The link has additional literary and philatelic information.
Link.
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
Automated postal centers print stamps on demand, and the stamps are imprinted with the date of purchase. Now, suppose you need to mail something that is time-sensitive requiring a postmark by a certain date – an application, a monthly payment, a proof-of-purchase – or your taxes. Could you use a preprinted APC stamp after the designated date and fool the recipient regarding when the letter was posted? David Malki conducted a “postmark experiment” to address that question.
I figured that to really put these stamps to the test, I should send the letters to an address relatively far away — to make sure it went through a lot of depots, verification centers, biometric drug-sniffers, or whatever. I don’t know how this stuff works; I assumed the barcode encoded a lot of crucial information about where the letter came from, where it was going, and how long the stamp should be honored. So I arranged with friends a thousand miles away (in Seattle) to receive the letters, and as a control subject, sent one letter that night of April 15. The next letter was sent the next day. And so on, at increasing intervals of time, through April 29, a full two weeks after the date of the stamp. I expected that letters sent in the first week or so would arrive, and then they’d start coming back. I was wrong. They all made it.
The interesting part was that, as predicted, not all of the stamps arrived with cancellations. Of the ten sent to Seattle, only six arrived there canceled — meaning that four envelopes (40%) arrived indicating only the April 15 date and no other postmark.
In the course of his experiment he discovered that the letters that arrived uncancelled could be remailed, and were accepted a second time by post office processing equipment. Doing that is strictly against postal regulations; you are not allowed to reuse “skips” (stamps not cancelled in transit). But his observation that an item can be posted after the date printed on the stamp is potentially useful in a variety of situations.
Link. Image credit [yes, we know it's an old one...]
Two artists have been playing pretty games with the UK Royal Mail’s automated sorting offices. It seems the machines simply read the colour of stamps to check whether the correct postage has been used, so it doesn’t matter what shape they are. Kim Rugg and John Spurgeon each use proper stamps, only they are cut into tiny pieces to create the art on the envelopes. As long as it’s cancelled, it counts! Rugg creates tentacled monsters (pictured), fireworks and beach scenes, while Spurgeon has a collection of vintage postcards sent with confetti postage called ShakesMyMail.
Link to Kim Rugg’s work. Link to John Spurgeon’s Flickr set.
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Every year, the United States Postal Service release a set of new stamps and this year, one particular set stands out: The Sunday Funnies Collection.
Comics Alliance blog has the scoop (and more pics):
Based on popular newspaper comic strips, the series will include stamps involving Archie, Garfield, Dennis the Menace, the cast of "Beetle Bailey," and my personal favorites, Calvin and Hobbes!
Link | USPS News Release – Thanks Laura!
The British Royal Mail service commissioned Studio Dempsey to create first class stamps with classic albums covers. The covers include albums from Blur, New Order, Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, Primal Scream, David Bowie, The Clash, Mike Oldfield, Pink Floyd, and Coldplay -but no Beatles.
The final selection of ten sleeves (which perhaps oddly doesn’t feature one of The Beatles’ album covers) will appear on a set of 10 stamps that will launch on January 7, 2010 – and the stamps will be uniquely shaped, as shown in these images, to accommodate a glimpse of a vinyl disc poking out of each record sleeve.
Link – via babycreativeblog
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