Two timely policy questions—”make or buy?” and “can public-sector employees innovate?” – are conveyed by the two seemingly prosaic stamps that make up today’s #stampoftheday offerings. The stamps are a 6-cent stamp picturing James Garfield issued on July 18, 1894 and a 1-cent stamp picturing Benjamin Franklin issued on July 18, 1924. In earlier […]

As this #stampoftheday project has unfolded, I have wondered about what my “options” would be for today, July 12, which, as my sister has already posted, is my birthday. I could have with a 3-cent stamp issued on July 12, 1954 picturing George Eastman, the founder of Eastman Kodak. (That seemed appropriate if only for

Another rainy day in Maine so I’m again sitting on the screened in porch thinking about how to write about today’s #stampoftheday, which, because it honors the Boy Scouts of America, is producing a range of reactions including nostalgia, anger, revulsion, and puzzlement. A mid-century classic that was the first of several honoring the Boy

As I write this #stampoftheday, I’m sitting on a screened-in porch watching it rain on a lake in Maine and I’m remembering a long-ago trip that I believe was my family’s last vacation together. The stamp spurring these memories is a 4-cent stamp issued in 1934 that portrays Mesa Verde National Park in southwest Colorado,

Baseball, which is near and dear to my heart, takes the field as today’s #stampoftheday, a 3-cent stamp issued on June 12, 1939, issued in conjunction with the opening of the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown NY. The stamp commemorates what was alleged to be the 100-year anniversary of the beginning of

I was struggling to find a #stampoftheday for today, wondering if I might finally have hit a dead end when I stumbled on an appropriate stamp not in my father’s US albums but instead in the two albums of UN stamps, which included an airmail stamp and air mail postcard both released on May 27,

A postcard sent by one of my mother’s friends to my father postmarked May 19, 1944, is today’s #stampoftheday. I found it among the cancelled envelopes in my dad’s collection – many of them the envelopes from letters he sent to my mom and his parents when he was in training and then in Europe

The country of Israel’s first stamps are today’s the #stampoftheday. Israel declared its independence on Friday, May 14, 1948. However, Israel Post, the Israeli postal operator, waited until Sunday May 16 – the day after Shabbat – to issue the country’s first stamps. Designed by Otto Wallish, a Czech graphic artist who came to Palestine

Today’s #stampoftheday took me into a whole different part of my dad’s stamp collection: a notebook full not of stamps but of postage-meter stamps, mostly from the mid 1950s, organized by state and then city. Some states, like New York, are well represented. Pages for others, like Wyoming, are blank. Here’s a cancellation for May

Two offerings for today’s #stampoftheday which, as seems increasingly be the case, will take on digressions that will include 26,000 lightbulbs, the Grateful Dead, an unsuccessful effort to monopolize the American organ industry, 10,000 pairs of left shoes, and a flag blowing the wrong way in the wind, and “if only he were around,” a