On April 18, 2020, I wrote a short, paragraph-long Facebook post that started: “though I’ve had them for years, it’s only in the last year that I started to look at my late father’s stamp collection.” I explained I was posting two images of first-day covers. One from April 18, 1958 with a stamp picturing […]

Over the past year, I’ve added stamps portraying Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, and Karl Marx to the many, many knickknacks on three small shelves in my basement office. The stamps – which collectively are today’s penultimate #stampoftheday offering—have joined a diverse array of objects that include (in no particular order) a wooden birdhouse my

About a year and a half ago, when I first started going through my late father’s stamp collection, I was delighted to find a 3-cent stamp, issued in 1957, honoring the 100th anniversary of the American Institute of Architects (AIA). I originally planned to make it the #stampoftheday on February 23, the anniversary of the

“It is a sobering thought,” Tom Lehrer famously said, “that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years.” Lehrer’s line, which I’ve loved and quoted for years, came to mind in the course of developing today’s #stampoftheday post, which marks the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in Warm Springs, Georgia

My father never said this specifically, but I’m sure he’d agree that, in general, when faced with a choice between live chickens and deceased white men, it’s best to go with the poultry. That was the “choice” I had when deciding what to write about today. One option was to write about a stamp, issued

About a week ago, I got a cryptic message on Facebook’s Messenger app from Ed Symkus, a longtime arts journalist who had been a colleague in the 1980s when I worked at The Tab. “I’ve recently been searching through stuff I’ve accumulated, giving it away, and making room for new stuff,” he wrote. “I just

It is fitting that the American Chemical Society (ACS) comes to the fore as my #stampoftheday “project” (obsession?) is coming to a close. For chemistry, in general, and the ACS, specifically, were incredibly important parts of my father’s life. It’s odd then, that his sometimes meticulous stamp albums doesn’t include today’s #stampoftheday. A 3-cent stamp

When we moved to Lexington in 1996, I knew that Patriots’ Day, the annual celebration of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, was a big deal. After all, I had been living in the Boston area for 16 years. But, it turns out, I had no idea what a big deal it was in Lexington,

On April Fools’ Day, I’ve been pranked by my own (late) father and his stamp collection. And, I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that I almost fell for it. In fact, I was getting ready to write a #stampoftheday post about how I had recently rediscovered that my father’s collection included four rare stamps issued

“Don’t mind me, I’m just having a conversation with your father,” said Joseph Mullin, executive director of Spellman Museum of Stamps & Postal History when he looked over the collection in January 2020, about three months before I started writing my #stampofthe day posts. “Not a problem,” I replied, “do you mind if I listen