3% Of Postage Stamps Feature Books & Writers

Over 5,200 stamps have been issued by the US Post Office and some 150 were of authors or books.  That’s a lot more than stamps about soccer (10), marine life (6), the Holocaust (5), photography (3), inventors (36), or insects (49), but about the same as the number of stamps honoring airplanes (149), children (168), politics (152), music (172), horses (137), movie industry (163), and Christmas (198).  The top four are art (589), animal (497), military (446), and entertainment (410).

So which authors have been featured on a postage stamp?  Dead ones, of course, although there was a Harry Potter series featured – sans author J.K. Rowling.  The first author featured is Benjamin Franklin, whose great contributions to society include ones that advanced book publishing.  Aside from creating bifocals (to help you read), and founding a library, he was a printer, and an author.  He advanced the freedom of speech as a founder of this great country.  He also discovered electricity, opened a firehouse, was the original postmaster, blah, blah, blah.

Some of the greatest writers of the past two centuries have been put on stamps, including:

Sidney Lanier

Edgar Lee Masters

Willa Cather

Robert Frost

John Steinbeck

Edith Wharton

Helen Keller

Herman Melville

Nathaniel Hawthorn

Peal Buck

Jack London

Sinclair Lewis

Walter Lippman

Margaret Mitchell

William Faulkner

T.S. Eliot, Writer

Marianne Moore

Tennessee Williams

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Margaret Mead

Edna Ferber

Ogden Nash

James Baldwin

Henry Wadsworth

Harriet Stowe

Edgar Allan Poe

Mark Twain

Sylvia Plath

Elizabeth Bishop

Gwendolyn Brooks

E. E. Cummings

Denise Leverton

One author shared his stamp with his famous character – Cat in The Hat and Dr. Seuss (Theodore Seuss Geisel).

I thought one of the most interesting choices was author Ayn Rand.

Several books got their own stamp, including:

·         Gone With The Wind

·         A Streetcar Named Desire

·         The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

·         Little House on the Prairie

·         Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm

·         Little Women

But the only book character to get a stamp that I’m aware of is Tom Sawyer.

Who among the living could get their own stamp?  Which books or characters are worthy of being honored by the postal agency?

While we think about such things the US Post Office is thinking about how to keep its doors open.  It would be nice to see more men and women of letters be honored on the thing that you used to need to send letters.

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Brian Feinblum’s views, opinions, and ideas expressed in this blog are his alone and not that of his employer. You can follow him on Twitter @theprexpert and email him at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels more important when discussed in the third-person. This is copyrighted by BookMarketingBuzzBlog © 2015