There's controversy over how the research money should be allocated, and some stamp collectors have asserted that since collectors buy many of the stamps, philatelic organizations deserve a cut also. This could mean an increased workload at a time when the service has had to announce the elimination of 9,000 jobs to cut costs. The stamps were mandated by Congress-who's going to vote against cancer research?-which has proposals for a dozen more semi-postals in the works. For instance, the Postal Service has a time-honored policy against shared-revenue stamps, but post offices currently are selling the first two "semi-postals," a 33-cent reissue of a stamp with a 7-cent surcharge earmarked for breast cancer research and another whose surcharge goes to prostate cancer research. In fact the pressure from interest groups can be enormous, and the issuance of a stamp sometimes is a measure of political clout. Along the way every step is guided by a dozen selection criteria designed to weed out such influences as commercialism, special interests or trivialities. In the normal flow of events it takes several years for a new stamp to progress from proposal to approval to final design to printing. The members, whose identities are kept confidential to avoid back-channel badgering, wade and weed their way through the proposals and forward the best to the postmaster general, who makes the final decisions.
Many are casual, or too crude or clumsy to consider, but most represent the best efforts of sincere citizens and are taken seriously by the 15-member Citizen's Stamp Advisory Committee, established in 1957. The Postal Service gets some 40,000 new stamp proposals a year. (We're not being gender-careless or male-pronoun prone here stamp collecting, like so many other odd activities, is largely a guy thing.)Īs the popularity of collecting has grown, so has the clamor from organizations and interest groups for stamps honoring their favorite people, places and events. If there's somebody out there who shares your particular philatelic passion, you can find him. Sales and swaps are widely available among more than 20,000 private, commercial and official Web sites. eBay auctions stamps under more than 100 major categories, each embracing many subspecialties. And, just as the New York Stock Exchange long ago grew away from men cutting deals on a Wall Street curb, stamp trading has gone electronic and online. Linn's Stamp News runs stamp index graphs the way the Wall Street Journal tracks stock markets. There are still plenty of hobbyists out there, casually collecting stamps by such whims as subject, style or color and mounting them in albums, but stamp collecting has become big business. Dealers and serious collectors have open accounts with the Postal Service so that they receive new issues automatically. Otherwise, most collectors now buy "mint" stamps by the block or booklet, pane or sheet. For one thing, used stamps seem to be going out of style, except for first-day covers, stamped envelopes postmarked on the day and at the place where they were first issued. Daddy could do the same, although from time to time he'd have to dip into his allowance to buy unusual issues from mail-order companies. When Granddaddy was a boy he could pretty well stay abreast of American stamp issues, largely by getting the parents of his friends and neighbors to save envelopes for him. The stamps come in a rustling, slithering flood of 5 billion to 6 billion a year: singles, sheets, rolls, blocks, booklets. Hardly a week goes by that the agency doesn't come out with a stamp honoring somebody or something, depicting an achievement or noting a problem. POSTAL SERVICE is stamping out American culture.
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