Harry Potter stamp riles Postal Service panel, traditional stamp collectors
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.
Set up as a filter between the postmaster general and the public, which petitions the Postal Service for about 40,000 stamp subjects and designs each year, the committee includes such eminent Americans as historian Henry Louis Gates Jr., former American Film Institute president Jean Picker Firstenberg, and Olympic swimmer and sportscaster Donna de Varona. A former postmaster general, a top Smithsonian Institution official, graphic designers and philatelists also belong.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/harry-potter-stamp-riles-postal-service-panel-traditional-stamp-collectors/2013/11/18/95d8ebb2-4d7a-11e3-ac54-aa84301ced81_story.html
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