Richard Sheaff designed an "Old Glory" stamp booklet tracing the American flag through five designs, from Civil War imagery to Victorian eagles to his own 1970 Martin guitar. He pulled the stamps from his personal collection, finding joy in discovering obscure subjects that connected his philatelic passion to American history.
The Old Glory stamp prestige booklet that contains 5 different stamp designs, and it's about the use of the flag as a symbol and how that has appeared in American culture over the last, say, 200 years, starting with the early political uses and political campaigns, Harrisons and Lincolns and others, and then through the Civil War period, the flag was a very much used patriotic symbol in the North anyway. Way. Then through the Victorian era when chromolithography came in and all of a sudden it was possible to reproduce images and artwork in color and there was a huge explosion of that. A fair number of them were promoted using the national symbols of the eagles and the flags and the Uncle Sam who had come along by that time. And followed it with images from the '40s and the '50s and the '60s and up through contemporary images. One of the last of which I guess was my guitar, my old Martin D-28 that I bought back in 1970. And so when this assignment came along to do something about Old Glory, I started rummaging through my accumulations of things and found that I, I had quite a bit of it and was able to pretty much put the booklet together and some of the stamps from things in, in my collection. So some projects are already of personal interest, but equally interesting are the ones that we know nothing know nothing about. It's really, for me, the most fun of this is finding out about the subjects.
