In a decidedly digital age, the modest postage stamp appears to be slowly vanishing from each day life—now not ubiquitous in wallets or pocketbooks, helpful however perhaps not important.
They’re so missed that the comic Nate Bargatze has a complete bit about how stamps make him “nervous.” “I don’t know what number of you’re alleged to placed on [a letter],” he says. “And so they change the value of stamps, and that’s not within the information, you recognize? You don’t discover that out on Twitter. It’s important to discover out from previous folks. They’re the one those that know.” (As somebody within the information, I’m responsibility sure to report that stamps’ value elevated from $0.66 to $0.68 on January 21.)
However stamps aren’t but solely anachronistic. Sure, the amount of first-class mail has been on the decline, however the U.S. Postal Service nonetheless sells about 12.5 billion stamps yearly. A few of it is a matter of style. “There are specific issues the place bodily mail continues to be seen because the socially appropriate method to do issues,” says Daniel Piazza, the chief curator of philately on the Smithsonian Nationwide Postal Museum, pointing to mailing marriage ceremony invites, birthday notes, and vacation playing cards.
However stamps serve a function that’s not merely practical. If you happen to look again far sufficient, in addition they inform a narrative about nationwide id, and the technological and cultural trajectory of America. Stamps “are each miniature artwork works and items of presidency propaganda,” Dennis Altman wrote in his 1991 guide, Paper Ambassadors: The Politics of Stamps. “They can be utilized to advertise sovereignty, have a good time achievement, outline nationwide, racial, spiritual, or linguistic id, painting messages or exhort sure behaviour.”
Richard Morel, the curator of the British Library’s Philatelic Assortment, put it to me extra succinctly: “Stamps democratize our historical past and tradition.” Briefly, the historical past of U.S. stamps tells a narrative of America.
The postage stamp as we all know it right this moment is a comparatively younger know-how. Previous to the mid-1800s, “most letters have been despatched accumulate, so postage was paid by the recipient of the letter relatively than by the sender,” Piazza advised me. This turned out to be a really unhealthy enterprise mannequin for the Postal Service. First, it required folks to go to their publish workplace to see whether or not they had mail. In actual fact, postmasters paid to run advertisements in native papers itemizing who had letters to gather so these folks would retrieve them. (One true fixed throughout time appears to be that individuals take into account going to the publish workplace a chore.) Then, if there was a letter for somebody they usually did decide it up, the receiver needed to pay the postage, which they generally refused to do, given its expense. “So it’s a really cumbersome, kind of costly system” for each the Postal Service and the receivers of mail, Piazza stated.
Till a breakthrough in 1840. The U.Okay. issued the Penny Black, the world’s first pay as you go, adhesive stamp. With this stamp, folks may ship a half-ounce letter for a flat, pay as you go price of 1 penny. The Penny Black featured the face of Queen Victoria, and, in an indication of the instances, some folks believed that “licking the again of the queen’s head was undignified, if not doubtlessly treasonous,” Altman wrote in his guide. On a current go to to the British Library, I used to be in a position to see the final remaining press of the sort that printed the Penny Black. Displayed on the library’s upper-ground flooring, the machine—which was smaller than I had imagined, given its perform—seemed as delicate as an antiquity of the Industrial Revolution can, with its massive spindle, rope pulleys, and iron weights.
This British innovation in stamp manufacturing set the trail for different international locations to observe. Within the 1840s and ’50s, a number of different nations developed their very own postage stamps. The U.S. issued its first ones on July 1, 1847: a five-cent stamp that includes Benjamin Franklin, the nation’s first postmaster normal, and a 10-cent stamp that includes George Washington. (Washington, distinguished in so some ways, additionally has the excellence of getting extra appearances on U.S. stamps than anybody else.)
The beginning of stamps within the U.S. was an unheralded affair. A postmaster in Maine mailed a letter—and not using a stamp, postage due—to the postmaster normal to inquire whether or not the stamps his workplace had obtained have been “real,” in response to Smithsonian Journal. However by 1856, all mail required federal, pay as you go postage stamps, and we largely entered the state of postage stamps as we all know them right this moment. Or, as Morel put it, their invention “triggered our info revolution.”
Stamp design, nevertheless, took somewhat longer to develop. For many years, American stamps adopted the aesthetics of coin-face design, that’s, profile drawings of heads of state. In our case, primarily lifeless presidents: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson. The U.S. didn’t start issuing commemorative stamps till 1893, timed to the World’s Truthful in Chicago, with a sequence of 16 stamps celebrating the four-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s voyage to the New World. Included within the sequence was an outline of Queen Isabella of Spain, making her the primary lady featured on a U.S. stamp. (The primary American lady on a stamp was Martha Washington, in 1902.)
Within the 130 years since that first commemorative stamp, lots of and lots of extra designs have been issued. U.S. postage stamps have celebrated momentous occasions, such because the 1932 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid New York, residence of the primary U.S. Winter Olympics Video games, and the moon touchdown, in 1969. There have been many stamp firsts: the primary Hispanic American (Admiral David Farragut, 1903), the primary Native American (Pocahontas, 1907), the primary African American (Booker T. Washington, 1940). Some stamps impart social messages: Forestall Drug Abuse (1971) or Alcoholism: You Can Beat It (1981). They’ve even been used to fund causes. The Breast Most cancers Analysis semipostal has bought greater than 1 billion stamps because it was first issued, in 1998, and has raised tens of millions of {dollars} for the trigger.
“If you happen to evaluate among the American stamp designs … to different international locations’, they’re extremely progressive a lot earlier on,” Morel stated. There’s the Black Heritage Collection, which started in 1978 with a picture of Harriet Tubman and nonetheless runs right this moment with annual new releases. Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan have been commemorated on a stamp in 1980. Even designs that may now be seen as dated or insensitive have been daring in their very own time. In 1969, the U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp that featured a picture of a younger little one regularly rising out of a wheelchair. The language on the stamp reads, Hope for the crippled. “The language is now problematic,” Morel stated, “nevertheless it’s the intent that underlies the stamp design, which is definitely a constructive one.”
These design selections are usually not made frivolously. In 1957, the Postal Service created the Residents’ Stamp Advisory Committee, which consists of a gaggle of individuals from throughout disciplines who take into account stamp suggestions from the general public. Anybody can counsel any topic to the council, which is able to weigh the advice as long as it meets its wholesome record of standards—for instance, the design ought to honor a topic or a determine that made a major contribution to American life, and the commemorated can’t be a dwelling particular person.
It’s a deliberative course of that may take a number of years—and for good cause. Practically any stamp design is definite to annoy somebody. Within the early Nineties, when the Postal Service introduced that it could be releasing a stamp that includes Elvis, some People have been scandalized. They couldn’t fathom the concept of honoring somebody who had dependancy points and was as soon as thought of too horny for broadcast tv. “I used to be appalled to see {that a} image of Elvis Presley is being thought of for a postage stamp,” one particular person wrote in a letter to the editor of the St. Louis Publish-Dispatch in 1992. “The image on a postage stamp must be somebody or one thing of historic significance or a person who has made a unprecedented contribution to the well-being of the human race … If Presley seems on a stamp, the postmaster normal must be fired instantly.” The Postal Service gained the day; the Elvis stamp is extensively thought of the preferred commemorative stamp in U.S. historical past. The choice to place Bugs Bunny on a stamp was additionally met with gentle indignation. “That one most likely didn’t go over as effectively with the intense stamp collectors,” says Jay Bigalke, the editor in chief of Linn’s Stamp Information. Folks used it as an excuse to “write to the Postal Service and say, ‘If you happen to can challenge a stamp for Bugs Bunny, you may challenge a stamp for fill-in-the-blank.’”
A cause these design decisions are so freighted is that they’ve broad, worldwide attain. “Trivial as they could appear, [stamps] are objects which can be extraordinarily dispersed each domestically and overseas, and which permit governments to propagate extensively the official tradition of a given state,” Altman wrote. Mentioned one other method, stamps let officers inform the story they wish to inform. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a stamp collector himself, “nosed his method into stamp design, even sketching them out on a serviette and passing it alongside to the postmaster normal on the time,” Bigalke advised me. After Roosevelt signed the Nationwide Industrial Restoration Act, he requested for a stamp selling the regulation to be issued. “He simply acknowledged the significance of the postage stamp and conveying a message,” Bigalke stated.
Different international locations use their stamps to inform tales too, and typically these tales are deeply influenced by the USA. Quite a few African international locations have launched stamps that includes Martin Luther King Jr., for instance, a testomony to King’s worldwide significance and recognition. The Apollo 11 mission has been featured on greater than 50 stamps in different international locations. A stamp issued by Iran in 1984 featured Malcolm X. American popular culture has additionally infiltrated worldwide postage stamps. Within the Caribbean, St. Vincent and the Grenadines has featured each Elvis and Michael Jackson on its stamps. (Jackson has not been featured on an American stamp.)
Stamps are additionally used for extra expressly political or propagandist functions. In 1969, North Korea issued a stamp referred to as “Worldwide Convention of Journalists In opposition to US Imperialism,” exhibiting a number of pens attacking President Richard Nixon. “The actual fact that [North Korea] makes use of stamps as a medium to assault America is, once more, proof [of] the worth of stamps,” Morel stated. “As a result of if there was no worth, why trouble?”
Extra lately, Ukraine used its stamp program as a kind of hearts-and-minds marketing campaign. “When the invasion and the conflict broke out, they issued a postage stamp exhibiting a soldier flipping off the battleship” off of Snake Island, Bigalke stated. Ukraine has “been utilizing stamps as a rallying cry within the nation in a way more highly effective method than every other nation actually has with their postage stamps,” he advised me. “Lots of people have purchased the stamps to assist help Ukraine.”
Stamps have additionally been used as a kind of bilateral foreign-relations device. A stamp commemorating joint Soviet-American efforts in house exploration was launched in 1975, in the course of the Chilly Warfare. And the U.S. and Australia collectively launched stamps celebrating the latter’s bicentenary, in 1988.
Maybe probably the most well-known American stamp design is one the U.S. Postal Service by no means needed to launch. In 1918, the division issued its first airmail stamp, which featured a Curtiss Jenny biplane. Due to its two-color design, the stamp needed to undergo the press twice. And in some unspecified time in the future within the printing, one of many plates was turned the wrong way up. This run resulted in 9 misprinted 100-stamp sheets. Eight of them have been discovered and destroyed on the printing flooring, however one misprinted sheet of the stamp—now referred to as the Inverted Jenny—discovered its method to the general public. (In 1939, this journal referred to such misprints as “philatelic romances.”) The Inverted Jenny has since change into one of the extremely prized stamps for collectors and is a small pop-culture phenomenon. It was briefly referenced within the movie Brewster’s Thousands and thousands and in a joke at Homer’s expense in The Simpsons. Final 12 months, a single Inverted Jenny stamp bought for somewhat greater than $2 million.
Stamps present “an incredible physique of fabric to check the historical past of communication, artwork, design, but additionally humanity,” Morel stated. And this research began primarily on the very first day of the fashionable postage stamp’s existence. The oldest surviving stamp assortment dates again to 1855, by a collector from Belgium who began amassing the stamps to study geography.
In 1943, within the midst of World Warfare II, The Atlantic printed a kind of protection of the pastime in its February challenge. “So stamp amassing. It’s a vice, however most nice,” wrote Henry Bellamann, a poet and an writer, within the article “Stamps for Me.” He later continued, “The stress of the day by which we live is unbelievably nice. We now have want of releases via easy pleasures.”
Seeing stamps via the prism of historical past made a current go to to my native, fluorescently lit publish workplace edge simply barely into thrilling territory. I had gone to return a package deal and thought I’d purchase some stamps. A gentleman forward of me in line requested in regards to the specific design I needed, and I overheard the teller say that it had bought out. So after I returned residence, I made a decision to purchase some stamps on-line. Scrolling via the gallery, I chosen some Our Woman of Guápulo vacation stamps (issued 2020) and a few Piñatas! stamps (issued 2023) to connect to invitations for a celebration. I may simply ship an e mail invite, however realizing that just about everybody’s temper lifts after they obtain precise letters, it solely feels proper to decide on the mailbox over the inbox.
Supported by the British Library Eccles Institute for the Americas Phil Davies Fellowship.
