5/25/2023 0 Comments Cave of Journeys by Penny Ross![]() ![]() In 1993, some 517 million Elvis Presley stamps were sold many popular single stamps bring the United States Postal Service revenues that over time rival the earnings of a Hollywood blockbuster. During the first five years after federal stamps were introduced, less than 2 percent of America's mail made use of them.Ī smile might have flickered across Johnson's dour visage if anyone had told him that stamps would become a major source of revenue. ![]() Congress was impressed, all right, but the public proved a harder sell. His department had been operating under a deficit, and Johnson had sold Congress on the idea that stamps would increase postal revenues by increasing the convenience and reliability of mailing private letters. Judging by a daguerreotype of Cave Johnson, who carries a prominent brow that protects bulging, intense eyes, the Postmaster General wouldn't have seen the humor in this missive. Postmaster General Cave Johnson-mailing it without a stamp as was then the custom-to ask whether to honor these "apparently genuine" stamps. Woodbury didn't even know that the federal government had issued official stamps. ![]() Up north in Portland, Maine, postmaster N. Hardly anybody bothered to use the stamps, though they bore the images of Ben Franklin and George Washington. When the United States Post Office issued the first federal stamps 150 years ago, the public response was distinctly, well, lukewarm. ![]()
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