Recollections of two legendary art directors

for the United States Postal Service and the

postage stamps they designed and inspired

To Ethel Kessler, who changed my life

with a single phone call.

Issued 1847

Issued 1847

had designed posters, books, and other stamp-related products for the Postal Service for 2O-some years when I became the coordinator of

the annual stamp program. That’s when I really learned about the unique criteria for stamp design. It is not just a matter of taking something and making it small. The format is tiny, so the image, typography, color, and production are all crucial. In addition to the design aspect, there are sensitive political issues to balance, plus a need for total accuracy. The first U.S. postage stamps were issued in 1847, and for almost 125 years, stamps looked very much like securities, beautifully engraved. It wasn’t until the 196Os with the advent of full-color printing and other new techniques, that we could break that mold. At about the same time, Bradbury Thompson became a Design Coordinator and then an Art Director for the Postal Service. His tenure spanned a quarter of a century (1968–1992). His stamp designs were as refined and elegant as he was. He modernized the stamp program from a visual standpoint and revolutionized the design of stamps over many years. Howard Paine joined the group in 1978. In 2OO6, Howard celebrated 25 years as an Art Director for the USPS. To this day, he acknowledges how much he learned from Brad about typography. He is a constant advocate for simplicity, his motto being “Look at it stamp-size.” During his 33 years at the National Geographic, Howard had built an amazing network of talented photographers and illustrators. Many times we’d be considering a stamp subject, trying to identify the best illustrator, and Howard would suggest someone whose particular style would allow us to try a completely different approach. One of the true pleasures of this job is that I am continually learning, whether it be the art of stamp design, or details about how stamps have come to be over the past number of decades.

Terrence McCaffrey, Manager, Stamp Development, USPS

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“One of the biggest and the most exciting challenges for any designer is the opportunity to design a postage stamp. Stamps are, as we refer to them, our nation’s calling card.”

Bradbury Thompson’s logo for Westvaco {1968} has a macron over the ‘a,’ creating

an extraordinary elegance as well as cueing the reader to pronounce a long ‘a.’ It also

meant that every printing job was two-color, for a tiny red stroke and nothing else.

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John Boyd

Typographer

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his effort on the part of Westvaco to have their logo like that, showed such attention to detail in

typography and printing production as well as design. This is one of the many things that Brad taught me: Let’s say you’re at a conference of like-minded people, having a drink in the bar, and you give someone your business card. When you follow up with a note, here is the same logo on your letterhead, on the envelope, the same design. At the office, there’s the brass cut-out on the wall. The result is that the individual feels

“in good hands.” This effect is viable no matter how knowledgeable you are in graphic design. When all these elements are in coordinated place, the individual feels in good hands. It’s subliminal.

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should have saved them. I can’t quite remember where I first saw them, but I still remember the effect they had on me.

I’m sure it was when I was in college, in the mid-7Os, that Westvaco

Inspirations for Printers snuck up and blind-sided me and what little I knew about graphic design at the time. I ran across them again in the studio among the paper and printing samples at my first design job out of school in 1978. I know I wondered, “Who is this guy?” and, “Wait, he’s printing 4-color process out of registration – you can’t do that!” and,

“Wow, he’s using upper- and lowercase at the same height!” Bradbury Thompson and his Westvaco magazines opened my eyes to a whole new world of design, and that was years before I knew he had also designed stamps. Bradbury Thompson (1911–1995) was born in Topeka, Kansas. He influenced generations of designers and art directors, serving on the faculty of the Yale School of Art for over thirty years. Sometimes honored as the “Father of Modern Magazine Design,” he was one of the most talented (and apparently one of the nicest) designers America

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met Brad when I was a student at Yale. He walked us through history to look at the design of type as

it related to its original period. We each had to do a book that presented maybe 1O typefaces, starting in the Gothic period up through the present, combining type with period images. Brad insisted that we use original sources– fortunately, the Beinecke Library was right there. He was a stickler for recognizing the quality of the original. If you were going to veer from that, then you needed to know what you were doing. To be a good clown, you have to practice the rigor of being a good athlete before you can act goofy.

dozen other magazines, including Smithsonian. His most notable book design was the Washburn College Bible, whose text is set in lines that follow the cadence of speech. His adaptation of classic typography to modern-world design was never more apparent than in the Westvaco Inspirations I lusted after as a young designer. Thompson designed over sixty issues between 1938 and 1962. He also conceived an experiment to simplify and improve our standard alphabet system, called “Alphabet 26,” which replaced the upper- and lowercase letterform for each letter with one or the other, but all 26 at the same cap-height. In 1958, Thompson received his first commission to design a stamp for the USPS, and a decade later was invited to join the Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee. He ultimately designed over 90 stamps, and the ones shown here are some of my favorites. I’ve put them into philatelic context with anecdotes from his fellow USPS art directors and John Boyd, who was Thompson’s “right arm” for over 3O years. Recently, after several attempts, I successfully placed the highest bid in an eBay auction, and purchased two volumes of Westvaco Inspirations from the early 5Os. As of this writing, I am anxiously waiting, checking the mail with childlike anticipation. This time I will save them.

Michael Osborne

November 2OO5

Derry Noyes

Art Director

USPS

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Notice Bradbury Thompson’s denomination and country

typographic variations on these stamps from the 60s and 70s.

Issued 1967

Issued 1972

Issued 1973

Issued 1964 Issued 1967

He was more famous for his experimentation than he was for his “typographic

exactitude,” his properness. I think of him as being very proper and saying, “You

shouldn’t use that typeface with that typeface,” but he was also very experimental.

Howard Paine

rad’s principle for anything you were designing, whether it was a book or a stamp, was to use

only one typeface, in only one weight, instead of using medium or italic or bold. Just varying the size. And that’s what he did for Westvaco on the reprint of a classic book every year. And if you look back at the Westvaco Inspirations magazines, beyond its

“typographic framework” Brad was wildly creative, separating an image into colors and printing them deliberately out of register.

BRichard Sheaff

Art Director

USPS

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Bradbury Thompson designed more

than 15 Christmas stamps. It was a

typographic challenge to ensure the

legibility of the institution in whose

collection the artwork resided.

This Norman Rockwell painting is

miniaturized beautifully with intaglio

engraving. Perfectly framing the image

with type is a “Thompson trademark.”

The red ‘8c’ brightens the text.

Issued 1972

Issued 1982

rad really had to push to get rid of the ‘cents,’ which was sometimes spelled out and sometimes

designated with the c-slash. He was able to standardize with simply a lowercase ‘c,’ and then ultimately to do away with it altogether. This progression took years to accomplish. Brad used to say,

“A stamp is the smallest canvas you can imagine, and every little element is an issue.” This was very valuable for me, because there is so little text on a stamp that every single kerning issue can be dealt with. Whereas you have to be willing to overlook something on a book– although I can’t say we overlooked anything in the Washburn Bible. It was a labor of love.

John Boyd

“A stamp is the smallest canvas you can imagine, and every little element is an issue.”

Bradbury Thompson

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Issued 1974

These stamps commemorate the centenary of the Universal Postal Union, an

international alliance of postal administrations. The selected paintings – all on

the themes of reading, writing or sending correspondence – represent the work of

artists from eight different countries.

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Issued 198O

I doodled these sketches of “Learning Never Ends” while everyone was talking

about the notion of “never ending.” I was thinking of Albers, and when I held

this up, Brad said, “That’s perfect, I have that print.” Albers had done versions of

Homage to the Square: Glow in many different color combinations.

Howard Paine

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Douglas Lewis

CSAC Member

(1978–2OO5)

Brad was patriotic, not in a red-white-and-blue, on-your-sleeve way, but he loved

the country. He did these stamps of architecture, and there were four issues of

four, honoring what the architects did that made our country look the way it

does. These are visible landmarks that should never be torn down.

Howard Paine

Issued 1982

so much admired the American Architecture series that Bradbury had designed with his son Dodge,

who was still a graduate student at the time. Dodge helped choose the architects and their specific buildings, and to design the stamps as well. Their solution was spare, Spartan, elegant, fitting the character of American architecture extremely well. Photography would have been difficult to reproduce back then. Line drawings were next best, and the intaglio engravings from Walter Richards’ drawings were great. In a one-line inscription, Bradbury gracefully fit each architect’s full name and life dates as well as the building name and its location.

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Derry Noyes

A British pound symbol sans crossbar

provides an ‘L’ with a flourish for the

Marquis de Lafayette. An uppercase

‘I’ replaces the numeral 1. The cent

designation is a lowercase ‘c.’

“Brad was a mixture of things, as we all are. In hindsight, a good solution looks obvious, but it isn’t…. He had this ability to zero in on the essence of an idea.” Derry Noyes

rad was a mixture of things, as we all are. In hindsight, a good solution looks obvious, but

it isn’t. I feel that way about the ABC-XYZ stamp, which really stands out for me. It was not an obvious solution, particularly in the context of the time. Brad distilled the idea of a library or books down to its bare bones, the essence: library, books, words, alphabet, a portion of the alphabet, letterform design. The stamp has beauty, elegance, and historical context with a contemporary approach. The tagline “Legacies to Mankind” helps enormously. I’m not sure without it that it would have carried the idea. Brad had this ability to zero in on the essence of an idea. I was sitting next to him when he was sketching the idea of the Love stamp – the five LOVEs with the hearts down the middle. He hadn’t proposed it to the Committee yet. His sketches were very deliberate and carefully crafted. And he had beautiful handwriting. The stamp seemed so obvious after the fact. It was a simple little black-and-white sketch while he was sitting there, and then we saw it in full color, and it was absolutely beautiful. {see page 14}

Issued 1977

B

The classical A, B, C and X, Y, Z are taken from a French 16TH century alphabet

drawn by Geofroy Tory for Champ Fleury, a treatise on “the Art and Science

of Roman letters.” Bradbury Thompson provided John Boyd with a sketch,

and Boyd redrew the letterforms “with all the guidelines, thicks and thins,” to

recreate original art. The zero in the denomination is actually an uppercase ‘O.’

The art directors used this typographic device on many 2O¢ stamps.

Issued 1977

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Issued 1982

The ingenious type solution on State Birds & Flowers is anchored with a beautiful

ampersand in the lower-righthand corner, accommodating bird and flower names

of varying lengths. Thompson commissioned 5O original paintings for this

landmark issue, which proved wildly popular with the public.

any of the subjects that appeared on stamps during the 8Os were handled beautifully,

mature patriotic American themes –and the type is classically beautiful. Brad’s legacy was both esthetic and subjective, meaning his treatment of subjects as such. He led the designers, and helped move the committee as well, into a period of excellence, bringing some cohesiveness to the program, particularly typographically. All of us continually make reference to Bradbury Thompson from time to time, in one way or another. I think he left a great legacy, and he was an eloquent gentleman if ever there were one.

Phil Jordan

Art Director

USPS

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e was preternaturally soft-spoken, with a sense of calm deliberation that preceded anything he ever

did or said. The Italian word is dolcezza, a sweetness of tone. His manner of speaking was so gentle that it was particularly intimate. In a group setting, everyone had the same sense, that Brad was speaking only to them. Brad was extremely reticent about saying anything negative. The way he would say that a thing sucked–and fortunately he went to his grave before he ever heard that locution–was to say that it was “admirable,” and

“very strong in this particular” in such a way that the designer would gladly agree to change the color of the numerals and do them in Garamond Imperial or Bodoni Italica. He had the typefaces all in a memory bank that was far greater than those of any computer nowadays. His quiet voice, gentle demeanor and shy persona overlay a mind like a steel trap.

With the rate change from 2O¢ to 22¢

in 1985, Bradbury Thompson finally

achieved his goal of eliminating any

reference to ‘cents’ on stamps.

Issued 1986

rad was ill at the end of his life, in and out of the hospital. I remember visiting with him one

time, and he wasn’t able to speak too well. I could hardly hear him as he was trying to say something. I leaned over very close, and he whispered, “I’d like to introduce you to my nurse Andrea. She’s been taking extremely good care of me.” He was always a gentleman, no matter what his pain. Two people who didn’t know each other couldn’t be in the room without Brad’s introducing them.

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John Boyd

Douglas Lewis

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Howard Paine poses in the office of his pre-Civil War era home, with his portrait

by woodcut artist Jerry Dadds, in the style of the 36 presidential stamps Dadds had

recently completed. {see page 23}

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his interview was conducted by Michael Osborne in the studio of Jane and Howard Paine’s home, in Delaplane, Virginia, on August 19, 2005. Ethel Kessler, who has been an art director for the USPS since 1997, was also present, and occasionally

performed great feats of memory. Howard had “dressed up” for this interview in a nice blue shirt, army green shorts, and shoes.

mo: How did you get to National Geographic?

hp: I had been working for a tiny advertising agency for four years, one guy and a secretary and me. It grew to about 25 people in the years I was there, with a production manager, an account executive and so on. I had what I thought were good ideas, or fresh ideas, and the owner would take them to the client without me, and they would come back gutted…and I got tired of that.

I saw an ad in The New York Times that a large East Coast publisher of science books and books about the world around us was looking for an editor- slash-designer. I answered it blind, and weeks later, I got a call from Herbert T. Henderson, the personnel officer of The National Geographic Society, and I could have fallen out of my chair. I had a couple of interviews, one in New York, and another one in Washington, and I sent a portfolio, and I got the job out of 250 applicants! So I knew that I wasn’t going to Boston or Chicago. It was “the Geographic,” and I stayed there 33 years.

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I redesigned the magazine, thanks to Melville Grosvenor. He had become the editor in January of 1957 and I was hired in August. He was the son of Gilbert H. Grosvenor, so Melville was the fourth generation to run the place. And I just lucked out. I tell people that the Geographic had a lot of really great photographers and picture editors, a lot of really good editors and journalists and researchers, but they didn’t have any real designers. So I was put in charge of white space. I’d say, “Let’s make it flush left,” or “Let’s make the margin bigger,” or “Let’s make the caption a little different configuration.”

mo: What years where you there?

hp: From August 1957 to December 1990. Melville Grosvenor was the editor for 10 years, and those years were a spectacular joyride for everybody. The magazine had always been printed sheet-fed, in downtown Washington, and our circulation was 2.5 million. When Melville left, it was up to 10 million, and we were printing at RR Donnelly in Chicago. Then we decided to buy our own presses in Corinth, Mississippi, which is right on the river, so paper could come in on barges, and the magazines could go out. They printed 10 million copies a month, and each one being a quarter of an inch thick, makes it easy for you to calculate: four magazines to the inch times 10 million is almost 40 miles, and that’s a bookshelf two-thirds of the way around the Beltway. And that is just for one month’s issue!

mo: What was your title when you left National Geographic?

hp: Senior assistant editor/art. The job was not designing the magazine, it was director of art. At the beginning, I was “chief of editorial layout.” In the early days, a department would be called a “service”– news service, school service, book service. And a department head was called a “chief.” So I was

“chief of editorial layout.” But I finally got to be called Art Director.

mo: And somewhere in there, you connected with the Postal Service?

hp: Yes, it was Don McDowell who called me to have lunch, and he invited me to be on the Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee. Don was the assistant to Gordon Morrison, who was the “stamp czar” in charge of stamp development and stamp distribution. Development is designing and printing stamps, and distribution is getting them out to the 35,000 or 40,000 post offices and determining what they need in each post office. And Don was in charge of stamp development.

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I redesigned the magazine, thanks to Melville Grosvenor. He had become the editor in January of 1957 and I was hired in August. He was the son of Gilbert H. Grosvenor, so Melville was the fourth generation to run the place. And I just lucked out. I tell people that the Geographic had a lot of really great photographers and picture editors, a lot of really good editors and journalists and researchers, but they didn’t have any real designers. So I was put in charge of white space. I’d say, “Let’s make it flush left,” or “Let’s make the margin bigger,” or “Let’s make the caption a little different configuration.”

mo: What years where you there?

hp: From August 1957 to December 1990. Melville Grosvenor was the editor for 10 years, and those years were a spectacular joyride for everybody. The magazine had always been printed sheet-fed, in downtown Washington, and our circulation was 2.5 million. When Melville left, it was up to 10 million, and we were printing at RR Donnelly in Chicago. Then we decided to buy our own presses in Corinth, Mississippi, which is right on the river, so paper could come in on barges, and the magazines could go out. They printed 10 million copies a month, and each one being a quarter of an inch thick, makes it easy for you to calculate: four magazines to the inch times 10 million is almost 40 miles, and that’s a bookshelf two-thirds of the way around the Beltway. And that is just for one month’s issue!

mo: What was your title when you left National Geographic?

hp: Senior assistant editor/art. The job was not designing the magazine, it was director of art. At the beginning, I was “chief of editorial layout.” In the early days, a department would be called a “service”– news service, school service, book service. And a department head was called a “chief.” So I was

“chief of editorial layout.” But I finally got to be called Art Director.

mo: And somewhere in there, you connected with the Postal Service?

hp: Yes, it was Don McDowell who called me to have lunch, and he invited me to be on the Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee. Don was the assistant to Gordon Morrison, who was the “stamp czar” in charge of stamp development and stamp distribution. Development is designing and printing stamps, and distribution is getting them out to the 35,000 or 40,000 post offices and determining what they need in each post office. And Don was in charge of stamp development.

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mo: And then, when was Terry McCaffrey’s position created?

hp: Not until much later, when they had a new Postmaster General named Marvin Runyon. He had been the head of the Tennessee Valley Authority. Marvin Runyon took Terry McCaffrey from designing stamp posters and put him in charge of coordinating all stamp design.

mo: So, can you remember the first stamp you worked on?

hp: I think the first one I get credit for was Auguste Bartholdi. {see page 24} I remember Don McDowell announcing, “This is going to be done by computer.” It was the first stamp where the elements were scanned, assembled, and manipulated on the computer. We combined a photograph of the Statue of Liberty, a watercolor of the sky, and a portrait of Auguste Bartholdi, the sculptor. And we did it all electronically!

mo: Do you have a couple of favorite stamps that you’ve designed?

hp: Much later, I did another Statue of Liberty stamp. {see page 25} I did a few stamps that were in a way an homage to Brad Thompson, because they were elegant, straight up-and-down, like a bookplate.

mo: And beautiful type?

hp: Yes, beautiful type!

mo: Where did the art for that stamp come from?

hp: When the Statue of Liberty was being restored for its Centennial, they put it in a “big box”– a network of scaffolding. The photographer, Peter B. Kaplan, took hundreds of pictures of the Statue during its restoration. He invited me up there. I could have taken a day off and looked at the statue nose-to-nose, but I was too busy at the time. That’s a real regret. It was foolish not to say, “Hey, what a wonderful opportunity to see the Statue close up!” He took a picture from which we made a steel engraving. We made a square portrait of her face, a real tight crop. And we printed the stamp in red, white and blue. It was jointly issued with France.

mo: It looks like Brad.

hp: It totally looks like Brad. Another stamp I did that looks like Brad, is “200 Years of Friendship with Morocco.” The Moroccans suggested that we do a picture of their consulate, a building that seemed swiped right out of Georgetown. We didn’t want to do the rowhouse, and we didn’t

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have a famous person to portray. (Also, Morocco and other Muslim nations don’t show human images on their stamps.) So, I searched through books and found an “arabesque” that I liked. {see page 28}

mo: I’d like you to talk in a broad sweep about some of the most important changes you’ve seen happen in the stamp design program.

hp: I think stamps today are better designed. The Postal Service is issuing more stamps, and I think they are better designed. In general, it seems that we are getting more and more commercial, and we’re honoring pop culture. As an old guy, I look at the program – we used to call it “The Program.” It’s what we plan to issue for the next year. Is the program balanced? Does it have sports and flowers and famous people and Black Heritage, and the whole variety pack of what the public supposedly wants? An example is “Celebrate the Century,” where we featured 150 aspects of the twentieth century. In the first decades of the century, we showed presidents and historical events, as well as frivolous inventions like the Ferris wheel. Because the Postal Service allowed school kids to vote on the subjects for the latter decades, we show no presidents, not even Eisenhower–and he would certainly have been eligible by Postal Service standards.

mo: Presidents can be honored one year after their death, right?

hp: Yes, anyone else has to have been dead for 10 years to be pictured on a stamp. It’s a way of preventing “memorial” stamps, issued immediately or soon after the death of a popular or famous personality.

mo: Name a stamp that you art directed which honors pop culture.

hp: One of my favorite sets is the Hirschfeld series. I worked with Al Hirschfeld, the famous New York Times caricaturist. I went up to his house and stayed overnight and worked with him in his studio. He had pencil drawings of the people we were honoring and he laid them out on a little counter. I said, “I’m sorry, Al, but you’ve got a cigar here, and a cigarette there, and a pipe there!” I said, “We’ve got to take them out…” and he never said a word, simply reached for his eraser and erased the cigar or the cigarette and just drew in some more lines. Smoking is a stage prop, but to have five out of 10 people smoking is promoting tobacco. The one showing Charlie Chaplin is one of my favorites. He’s tipping his hat, and his elbow is bumping a letter in his name. A little bit of animation in the design. I was able to have fun with that. {see page 27}

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have a famous person to portray. (Also, Morocco and other Muslim nations don’t show human images on their stamps.) So, I searched through books and found an “arabesque” that I liked. {see page 28}

mo: I’d like you to talk in a broad sweep about some of the most important changes you’ve seen happen in the stamp design program.

hp: I think stamps today are better designed. The Postal Service is issuing more stamps, and I think they are better designed. In general, it seems that we are getting more and more commercial, and we’re honoring pop culture. As an old guy, I look at the program – we used to call it “The Program.” It’s what we plan to issue for the next year. Is the program balanced? Does it have sports and flowers and famous people and Black Heritage, and the whole variety pack of what the public supposedly wants? An example is “Celebrate the Century,” where we featured 150 aspects of the twentieth century. In the first decades of the century, we showed presidents and historical events, as well as frivolous inventions like the Ferris wheel. Because the Postal Service allowed school kids to vote on the subjects for the latter decades, we show no presidents, not even Eisenhower–and he would certainly have been eligible by Postal Service standards.

mo: Presidents can be honored one year after their death, right?

hp: Yes, anyone else has to have been dead for 10 years to be pictured on a stamp. It’s a way of preventing “memorial” stamps, issued immediately or soon after the death of a popular or famous personality.

mo: Name a stamp that you art directed which honors pop culture.

hp: One of my favorite sets is the Hirschfeld series. I worked with Al Hirschfeld, the famous New York Times caricaturist. I went up to his house and stayed overnight and worked with him in his studio. He had pencil drawings of the people we were honoring and he laid them out on a little counter. I said, “I’m sorry, Al, but you’ve got a cigar here, and a

hp: There are four sheets of Presidents, each printed in a variation of black:

a blue-black, a green-black, a brown-black, and a dark navy-black. They are

not actually produced as woodcuts. Jerry did each one as a woodcut, but then

he’d proof it, and fix it up with pen and ink, and then that art was engraved.

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Issued 1986

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Issued 1985

hp: Some people commented, “Oh, we’ve got the sun setting on Liberty.” We had

the sun in there, and Liberty is facing this way, which means the sun is over New

Jersey, so it means it’s setting. So we had to take out the ball of sun. It was all

scanned by Sci-tex – a lot of the graphic computers that we use today were built in

Israel, and they were made for wall coverings and carpets and fabric that went on

forever with a paisley design that would repeat and repeat and repeat.

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Issued 1986

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Issued 1998

Four Centuries of American Art was a milestone for the Postal Service in that we

were able to take 20 large masterpieces of American art and distill them down

to a smaller canvas and make them work at stamp scale. This success was due in

part to Howard Paine’s great eye for cropping, in part to John Wilmerding’s

recommendations of paintings, and in part to printing technology. Howard and

John collaborated to come up with a pane of stamps that was a work of art in itself.

Terrence McCaffrey

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Issued 1994

hp: Hirschfeld’s drawings are printed offset to retain the fluidity of his line, and

the element of intaglio appears in the torn ticket stub. The engraved ticket stub is

identical on each stamp, though the color alternates and the position varies. The

intaglio is a security device to prevent forgery of the stamps.

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Issued 1987

hp: The Postal Service has had five-pointed stars, six-pointed stars, four-pointed

stars, and this has 12 outer points, all interlocking. I made the artwork out

of rubylith, about 2 ft. in diameter, and I just cut and cut and cut.

mo: Sacred geometry out of rubylith. Brad must have been smiling on you while

you were doing that stamp.

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Issued 1998–2000

1900s

1950s

1930s 1930s

1960s

1950s 1960s

1960s 1970s

The monumental Celebrate the Century series was co-art-directed by Howard

Paine and Carl Herrman. The pair created ten panes of 15 stamps, one for each

decade. Carl recalls, “I moved into Howard’s home for a week. This allowed us to

think like one in developing a series in which we didn’t want anyone to know there

were two different art directors. We chose a different artist for each decade. These

illustrators had to be unbelievably versatile. Howard’s experience and contacts

meant that he knew all the artists we needed for this mammoth project.”

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Page 14 Issued 2005

Bradbury Thompson’s Love stamp is a typographic valentine engraved in six colors. This stamp measures 1" x 1 1/ 2" but has the impact of a mini-poster.

Page 30 Issued 2005

hp: My newest stamp is simply the Presidential Seal, with calligraphy by Julian Waters. Elegant simplicity, I’d like to think it’s in the Brad Thompson tradition.

This little book resulted from an assignment for my MFA

Publication Narratives class, taught by Michael Sainato at the

Academy of Art University, San Francisco. Special thanks to

Phil Hamlett for the unprecedented opportunity to have this

piece printed originally at Cenveo, in South San Francisco,

to highlight the capabilities of the Goss 150 non-heatset web

press. This casebound edition has been slightly altered for

thesis purposes.

The content of this booklet depended on the graciousness

and keen memories of everyone I interviewed. Their insights

have given me a deeper appreciation of Bradbury Thompson

and Howard Paine. I am doubly indebted to Howard Paine

for his generosity in speaking with me and for referring me to

John Boyd. I am forever grateful to Terry McCaffrey for his

extraordinary support of my master’s thesis. My special thanks

to Ethel Kessler, who changed my life with a single phone call,

and Alyson Kuhn, my fanatical philatelic friend and advisor.

Michael OsborneMay 2007

Stamps reproduced in this booklet are shown in accordance with Federal regulations. In full color, stamps can be repro-duced at 75% of actual size or less, or 150% of actual size or greater, without being “cancelled” by a diagonal slash through the denomination.

Design and Text: Michael Osborne

Editor and Thesis Advisor: Alyson Kuhn

Course Instructor: Michael Sainato

Graphic Design Chair: Mary Scott

MFA Director: Phil Hamlett

Book Binding: The Key Printing and Binding

Special thanks to Sheri Kuniyuki and Cody Dingle at MOD

32

www.academyart.edu

© 2007 Michael Osborne