Three #stampoftheday offerings today. The first two – a 2 cent stamp featuring Andrew Jackson and a 10-cent stamp featuring Thomas Jefferson – are from a series of stamps issued in 1870 to replace an series issued in 1869 that apparently was unpopular because the stamps were too small, unattractive, and of inferior quality. The new issue featured, in profile, famous deceased male Americans including presidents Jefferson and Jackson. These were issued before the practice of first-day covers began, but the first known date they were used was May 14 1870.

Nicknamed the “Bank Note” stamps, this series was printed by three prominent Bank Note printing companies – the National, Continental, and American Bank Note Companies, in that order. As the contract for printing passed from company to company, so did the dies and plates. Each company printed the stamps with slight variations, which means that identifying them can, in the words of the Mystic Stamp website, “be both challenging and complex,” which makes them “a truly fascinating area of philately.”

The third stamp for today is a bi-colored 6-cent airmail stamp issued on May 14, 1938 that marked the the 20th anniversary of the first government airmail flight in 1918, when airmail service was launched, in part, to provide a way to train pilots fighting in World War I. The design supposedly was based on a sketch by President Franklin Roosevelt, a stamp enthusiast who apparently had some extra time on its hands and didn’t like the ideas for the stamp presented to him by postal officials. The stamp first went on sale in Dayton, the home of the Wright brothers, and St. Petersburg, where the first passenger flight was made and where the American Air Mail Society held its annual convention in 1938.