Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Stamps of the living

The New York Times reports that beginning in 2012, the United States Postal Service will begin considering the non-dead as stamp subjects:

When the news broke Monday on the Web sites of various news organizations, including The New York Times, readers began promoting their favorite candidates. Popular nominees included Lady Gaga, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Bob Dylan. CBS News gave readers a choice, listing options like Neil Armstrong (very popular) and Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook (not so much).
Armstrong and Dylan, yes. If there is a Gates stamp, there will have to be a Jobs stamp first, so that the Gates stamp’s designer has something to imitate.

What living person would you like to see on a U.S. stamp? Pete Seeger comes first to my mind. Among the dead, Eudora Welty, who did, after all, write the short story “Why I Live at the P.O.”

comments: 7

jw said...

To be honest, I wasn't every excited about the prospect of putting a living person on a stamp -- too much vainglory or something -- until you mentioned Pete Seeger. The man is not only an American treasure, but he is a fine example of the best kind of American: critical but still loving, outspoken but not brash.

There is always too much Dylan in Dylan, too much of a cult of celebrity around him. But Seeger never puts himself first, and that makes him tops in my book (first shall be last and all that).

Pete said...

Of course, this assumes that there will still be a Postal Service to issue them...totally agree about Gates. Microsoft has never been a first mover - instead they've always let other companies innovate (operating systems, web browsers) and establish a market, then swoop in for the kill.

Adair said...

Let's see..Sonny Rollins. The poets Marie Ponsot, Philip Levine, and John Ashbery. The novelist Paula Fox. The ballerina Suzanne Farrell. Neil Armstrong, absolutely.The painter Dorothea Tanning. Tony Bennet, surely. Kristen Wiig, especially after her impression of Michele Bachmann. And the circumspect and dignified bartender at Bemmelmann's Bar in Manhattan, who makes the perfect Martini but is too modest to give his name...

Stefan said...

I'll skip my literary heroes in favor of my baseball ones: Harry Caray and Ron Santo. Holy cow!

Stefan said...

Thanks, everyone, for being too polite to point out that I missed the word "living" in "living person." Oh well. Mssrs. Caray and Santo are alive to me.

Michael Leddy said...

What a great collection of persons past and present.

Adair, I’m wondering why I’d never heard of Dorothea Tanning before.

Adair said...

She's been switching to writing lately and her poems are quite good. Some have appeared in the New Yorker. I'm trying to find the movie in which she and Max Ernst move like chesspieces through the streets of New York---the city's grid is turned into a chessboard.