Posts Tagged ‘Postage Stamps’

Collectors stories 1

Saturday, February 20th, 2010

In 1962 the United States post office issued a stamp to honour the U.N. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold. During the printing process one sheet got turned around so that the yellow printing was inverted.  A stamp collector, Leonard Sherman, spotted the error at his local Post Office and bought the whole sheet for $2, expecting to make a lot of money from it. When the Postmaster General heard about it he ordered another forty million stamps to be printed with the error so that the original sheet was worth no more than the correctly printed stamps.

The Simpsons on stamps

Sunday, May 24th, 2009

The United States Postal Service issued a set of five 44 cent stamps featuring the cartoon characters The Simpsons on 7th May.  The stamps were drawn by Matt Groening and the post office had a billion copies printed.  A special postmark was used on mail posted at Springfield on the first day of issue.  U.S. Postal Service vice president said “We are looking to encourage a younger generation to develop an interest in stamp collecting by creating stamps that they can relate to.”