Inside Linn’s: U.S. Bicentennial-era stamps on international mail

By Charles Snee

The July 1 digital-only issue of Linn’s Stamp News will be available to subscribers Saturday, June 15. While you wait for your issue to arrive in your inbox, enjoy these three quick glimpses of exclusive content available only to subscribers. 

Bicentennial-era stamps used in international mails

“Throughout the 1970s and even into the early 1980s, the United States Postal Service issued many commemorative stamps and souvenir sheets honoring people, events and symbols of the American Revolution,” writes Richard L. Beecher in Modern U.S. Mail. Those stamps were used regularly on international mail to promote bicentennial celebrations outside the United States. Beecher illustrates and discusses two such letters, one of which is pictured above.

Using Pinterest to find stamps and create a stamp board

In Computers and Stamps, William F. Sharpe takes readers on a guided tour of Pinterest, which describes itself as a “visual discovery engine for finding ideas like recipes, home and style inspiration, and more.” Sharpe launches his exploration of the social network by searching for “postage stamps.” He then searched for “famous stamp collectors.” The latter query served up “stamps featuring Winston Churchill, Herbert Hoover and Bela Lugosi, among others, some of who were not known to be stamp collectors,” Sharpe writes. Read the whole column for other useful pointers.

Word search puzzle: 28 stamps from Canada

Linn’s regularly publishes three games to entertain readers: Trickies, a word scramble puzzle by Joe Kennedy; a word search puzzle by D.E. Rubin; and Philatelic Lexicon, a crossword puzzle by David Saks. In this week’s issue, Rubin tasks readers with finding 28 words associated with stamps issued by Canada. To set the stage for the coming search, Rubin highlights several facts about Canada, including its 5,525-mile-long border with the United States, which is the longest international border in the world. Canada is also the world’s second-largest country by size.

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