First Class: America's Marvelous Midcentury Stamps by David Cobb Craig

A rare, magnified look at America's best-designed stamps from the mid-20th century!

Every picture tells a story—even one on a postage stamp. Presented enormously enlarged, the 128 stamps in this book chronicle a stylish era of design: mid-20th-century America. Spanning the late 1950s to the early 1970s, these mini-masterpieces were created when the US post office started to lavish color on its stamps and to hire the best midcentury talents to design them.

• Magnifies the stylish beauty of 144 mini-masterpiece postage stamps chronicling a stylish era of design from the late 1950s to the early 1970s
• The roster includes Japanese American children’s book illustrator Gyo Fujikawa, barrier-busting Black graphic artist Georg Olden, Bauhaus master Herbert Bayer, and sultan of psychedelia Peter Max.
• Divulges the stories behind 144 tiny pieces of 1960s and 1970s art, including works by pop artist Robert Indiana and Bauhaus master Herbert Bayer

A native of the cotton-ginning town of Oak Grove, Louisiana, and a lifelong philatelist, author David Cobb Craig became enchanted with postage when in the 1960s and ’70s he saw pictures of about-to-come-out stamps posted on the bulletin board at his small local post office (71263).

Photographed at five, ten, and even fifteen times their actual size, each stamp is presented with a morsel of fun info that will broadly appeal to stamp collectors, history and nostalgia buffs, midcentury design fans, and everyone who likes to geek out on magnified views of teeny images.

98 color images