Posted on 08/06/2008 1:48:53 PM PDT by Clint N. Suhks
NEW YORK — The devil, as they say, is in the details.
So when an astute stamp collector recently discovered that one of the Old Glorys in the U.S. Postal Service's "Flags 24/7" series appears to have 14 stripes, it was bound to send a wave of excitement through the philatelic community.
"Is there any icon better-known to Americans than their own flag?" said Fred Baumann, a spokesman for the American Philatelic Society. "This is something somebody should have caught along the way."
The stamp in question, "Night," was released by the Postal Service on April 18 as part of a series of four stamps painted by Maryland artist Laura Stutzman depicting Old Glory at sunrise, noon, sunset and night.
Stutzman's 42-cent stamp shows the flag flying proudly before a waxing moon, but instead of six white stripes, Old Glory has seven.
Stamp collector Tony Servies wrote about the extra stripe this week on his blog StampsofDistinction.com after reading a June 30 letter to the editor about the extra bar in Linn's Stamp News.
"The first thought is, this is an anomaly," Servies said. "This is something that probably should be corrected; whether they do or not remains to be seen. If they do correct it, of course, it’s an error stamp or a reissued stamp that would potentially make it a little more valuable."
Officials from the Postal Service acknowledged Wednesday they were aware of the error.
"It’s been noticed," Roy A. Betts, a spokesman for the U.S. Postal Service said, adding that 3.75 billion stamps in the series have been printed to date. The series is the Postal Service's primary mail-use coil and is available in rolls of 100, 3,000 and 10,000.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
While they’re at it, add seven stars. /Obama
Well we have 58 or 60 states, why not 14 colonies?
The implication is actually 15 stripes because the frame cuts off what would be the bottom red stripe.
No, he said there were 60 states.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2008/05/new-patriotic-o.html
Watch the video. He said he’d been to “57 states, with one left to go, and Alaska and Hawaii” he really wanted to go to, but his staff couldn’t justify it.
I stand corrected. As an illustration of the current state of education offer 10 dollars to any bright kid if he can name all 60 states. I bet he can’t do it. The most I was ever able to name without a map is 50.
it took 2 posts for this thread about stamps to turn into an obama-bash-fest. love it.
Didn’t the U.S. flag actually have fourteen stripes, for the thirteenth and fourteenth states, around the time of the War of 1812, when Congress standardized the number of stripes back to twelve?
Anyway, the USPS stamp artist wouldn’t have that perspective, IMHO.
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