Harry Potter stamp creates a stir
WASHINGTON - For more than half a century, a committee of cultural heavyweights has met behind closed doors, its deliberations kept secret, weighing the faces and images of Americana worthy of gracing U.S. postage stamps. While its rulings have been advisory, they long carried the weight of writ.
WASHINGTON - For more than half a century, a committee of cultural heavyweights has met behind closed doors, its deliberations kept secret, weighing the faces and images of Americana worthy of gracing U.S. postage stamps. While its rulings have been advisory, they long carried the weight of writ.
Now comes a youngster from across the seas. He isn't what these leading lights from the fields of arts and letters, athletics, and philately had in mind. For one, he seems kind of crass to some. And worse, he isn't even American.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Postal Service is scheduled to release 20 postage stamps honoring Harry Potter, and officials at the cash-strapped agency hope the images, drawn straight from the Warner Bros. movies, will be the biggest blockbuster since the Elvis Presley stamp 20 years ago.
But the selection of the British boy wizard is creating a stir in the cloistered world of postage-stamp policy. The Postal Service has bypassed the panel charged with researching and recommending subjects for new stamps, and the members are rankled, not least of all because Potter is a foreigner, several members said.
The dispute caps more than a year of friction between the Postal Service and the Citizens' Stamp Advisory Committee, named by the postmaster general to help make sure that the American experience is properly portrayed.The committee has grown increasingly disaffected over how the agency's marketing staff has pushed pop culture at the expense of images that could prove more enduring.
For one of the few times in its 56-year-history, the committee was not consulted in the decision to put Potter and his friends and foes on the run of 100 million "forever" stamps.
"Harry Potter is not American. It's foreign, and it's so blatantly commercial it's off the charts," said John Hotchner, a stamp collector in Falls Church, Va., and former president of the American Philatelic Society, who served on the committee for twelve years until 2010. "The Postal Service knows what will sell, but that's not what stamps ought to be about. Things that don't sell so well are part of the American story."
Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe said in an interview that the agency "needs to change its focus toward stamps that are more commercial" as a way to increase revenue to compensate for declining mail volume as Americans switch to the Internet.