Harry Potter stamps released

WASHINGTON: The US Postal Service (USPS) released 20 postage stamps honoring Harry Potter on Tuesday, and officials at the cash-strapped agency hope the images, drawn straight from the Warner Brothers 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, top Smithsonian Museum official, graphic designers and philatelists also belong.
Its mission is to ensure that stamp subjects “have stood the test of time, are consistent with public opinion and have broad national interest.”
For one of the only 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, Virginia, 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.
Stamp sales have dropped along with first-class mail. Sales came to $7 billion last year, postal officials say.
The agency lost $5 billion last year and continues to face severe financial problems in part because of massive payments to fund health-care benefits for future retirees. It has pressed Congress for help, but a fix is unlikely this year.
Donahoe said postal officials chose Harry Potter because of subject’s appeal to young people — and in an effort to inspire that demographic to become collectors. He acknowledged that the advisory committee feels “a lot of disruption” from the agency’s change in direction. “As we move in [a commercial] direction, they’ll be working with us on that,” he said.