Our Homepage
Live Mail/Phone/Web Auction
7 Day Live Auction
Online Shopping
My Want-List
Frequent Buyer Program
Gift Certificates
Secure Payments
More About Us
E-Mail Us
Suggestion Box

Subscribe Now!

American Design Series Begins With Toleware Coil

A new United States definitive series will get under way with the release of the multicolored 5¢ American Toleware coil stamp.

Produced exclusively in coil rolls of 10,000 - although the image above, a publicity photo released by the United States Postal Service, shows a die-cut self-adhesive format - the new stamp will be issued in a ceremony at 10:30 a.m. on Friday, May 31, during the opening day of the National Philatelic Exhibition — Napex 2002 — in McLean, Va.

The stamp is the first in what the USPS is calling its “American Design” series — possibly the successor to the 20th-century Transportation coil series. Cathy Yarosky of the USPS told Stamp Collector that the new series will celebrate American arts and crafts.

The stamp presumably also will supplant the 5¢ Circus Wagon coil, which was reprinted in coil rolls of 3,000 and 10,000 late in 1998 for use by mass mailers.

Unlike most recent U.S. issues — but like the Transportation coils that preceded it — the 5¢ American Toleware coil will have gum that is water-activated, rather than pressure-sensitive (self-adhesive).

The 5¢ stamp shows a colorfully handpainted tin teapot. A traditional Pennsylvania folk art, toleware was previously seen on a se-tenant block of four 15¢ stamps issued in 1979 in the now-defunct Folk Art series.

It is similar to one of the two teapots that were pictured in the 23-year-old block, shown above.

Plans for the new 5¢ coil were revealed inadvertently in the Feb. 7 Postal Bulletin, a biweekly USPS internal publication (Stamp Collector, March 11, page 1).

Postal Service design veteran Derry Noyes served as art director, designer and typographer for the stamp, with McLean resident Lou Nolan as illustrator.

American Packaging Corp. of Columbus, Wis., printed an order for 300 million stamps (30,000 coil rolls of 10,000) in six-color gravure on nonphosphored type III paper using a Rotomec 3000 Press for Sennett Security Products.

The stamps were processed into finished form at Unique Binders in Fredericksburg, Va.

According to the USPS, plate or cylinder numbers will consist of an “S” followed by seven single-digit numbers and will appear every 14 stamps.