Howard Paine designed the Elvis stamp after the Postmaster General pushed for an American music series that the Citizens Stamp Advisory Committee had resisted. The Postal Service mailed voting postcards asking the public to choose between young or old Elvis, with the youthful image winning. Paine made all stamps in the series look like 1960s record album covers, valuing stamps as ephemera meant to be used once and discarded.
For a long time, the Citizens Stamp Advisory Committee, uh, was besieged by requests to do a stamp honoring Elvis Presley. They all said, we don't need to do Elvis, let's put him off. But the Postmaster General had a different idea, and he wanted to do, uh, a series of stamps honoring one of our nation's biggest exports, which is music, popular music. And he wanted to do a series of stamps honoring gospel and rhythm and blues and jazz and classical and Hollywood music and Broadway music, starting with— guess who— Elvis Presley. And for the first time, the Postal Service issued a little postcard voting ballots. Do you like the young Elvis or the old Elvis? The young Elvis won hand down. My theory was in design that they would all be the same size and format. They're all semi-jumbos, and that they would all have, uh, they would look like record album covers of the '70s or '60s, which had a lot of torn paper That's my ephemera and my collection of old things coming to the fore. I save paper ephemera. Ephemera means something that is used only briefly, like a trolley transfer or a ticket stub. And all of those things have a certain magic to me because they're printed and they're dated. Stamps are very ephemeral. You put it on an envelope and hope that it gets there the next day, and it's canceled and it's beat up and It's the envelope's torn open, and in a way it's done its job of delivering the mail. And, um, most stamps are thrown away in a wastebasket.
