Inside Story of Wildlife of the 50 States Stamps
by George Amick
- Release of the "Wildlife of the 50 States" Stamps
- Predecessors of the Pane of 50 Wildlife Stamps
- The Decision is Made to Issue 50 Wildlife Stamps
- The Artist is Chosen
- Developing the List of 50 Subjects
- Designing the Stamps
- Striving for Accuracy
- A "Workhorse" Printing Press is Chosen
- Arranging the Stamps on the "Sheet"
- The Wildlife Stamps are Printed
- Preparing for the First-Day Ceremony
- About Writer George Amick
- About this Article
Release of the "Wildlife of the 50 States" Stamps
Saturday, June 13, 1987, dawned sunny and unseasonably warm in Toronto. It was a day stamp collectors and stamp dealers all over North America had long awaited. The day would see the opening of CAPEX '87, Canada's first international philatelic show in almost a decade. And it would also see the first release, at CAPEX, of a dramatic new U. S. postal issue - a pane of 50 multicolor commemorative stamps picturing 50 different species of American wildlife.
The two events took place together in Room 105 on the lower level of the spacious Metro Toronto Convention Centre in the heart of the Ontario metropolis. Here some 800 invited guests - 400 seated and an equivalent number standing assembled at 9:15 a.m. for the ceremony that would open CAPEX and dedicate the wildlife stamps.
The principal speaker for the U.S. Postal Service was Mitchell H. Gordon, Senior Assistant Postmaster General, Marketing and Communications Group.
"The 50 North American wildlife stamps are the centerpiece of our 1987 stamp program," Gordon told the audience. "And our decision to issue them here at CAPEX is a reflection of the importance that we place both on the exhibition itself and on the tradition of cooperation between our countries."
The Postal Service had been "eager to see how these beautiful stamps will be accepted by mailers and stamp collectors," Gordon said. "So far, the response has been fantastic. One of the most encouraging aspects has been the incredible interest expressed by people who have never really been interested in stamps before ...
"U.S. stamps ... are a reflection of our national character and an expression of the values that we hold most dear ...
"Stamps which portray animals can accomplish so much. The natural beauty of the subjects surpasses any human creation. The most majestic painting or sculpture cannot approach the magic and elusive elegance of a red fox gliding through a forest glade.
"In addition to the beauty they portray, wildlife stamps also provide an opportunity to consider the breathtaking natural heritage we enjoy. From the Arctic Circle to the Rio Grande River, our continent offers climate and topography more varied than any other land mass in the world. Not surprisingly, it is a veritable paradise for the nature lover. Each region has its own unique characteristics, and each creature its own special quality.
"But this continent is also the stage of struggle - a struggle for space. For many animal inhabitants, it is also a struggle for survival. "
Gordon reminded his listeners how the spread of civilization had led to drastic declines in numbers for many species, including the bison, beaver, elk, gray wolf, and grizzly bear.
"But, ironically, as wildlife habitats are reduced and compromised, more and more people are interested in seeing and protecting the animals," he said. " Increasingly, there is solid evidence that we are recognizing that we are very much a part of the complex web of life on this continent.
"And with more people interested and involved, we are beginning to consider the consequences of our actions and address the many vital, and vexing, questions of environment ...
"Because they reach into almost every home, postage stamps have a special ability to draw attention to the vital issues of the day. Ignorance and misunderstanding have always posed the greatest threat to wildlife. And if these stamps cause only a few people to reflect on the wildlife questions before us, they will have accomplished quite a bit."
After Gordon concluded, he stepped forward to an easel and, with the help of Harry Sutherland, vice chairman of CAPEX, uncovered a large reproduction of the pane of wildlife stamps. He then presented USPS gold-embossed albums containing mint panes to each of the other ten persons on the speaker's platform.
Sylvain Cloutier, Chairman of Canada Post (left) and the U.S. Postal Service's Mitchell Gordon ' Senior Assistant Postmaster General (right) inaugurate Canada's new Capex '87 Souvenir Sheet and America's Wildlife Stamps at Capex '87 in Toronto.
When the final speaker had been heard, Donald Lander, president of Canada Post, and Vincent Greene, chairman of CAPEX, cut a ribbon of stamps in front of the platform to formally open the exhibition. Five of the honored guests then moved to a nearby table to prepare for a very special task - that of signing their names several hundred times.
One was Chuck Ripper, designer of the 50 wildlife stamps. With him at the table were two fellow artists, John Mardon and Bernard Reilander, who had designed the four stamps and souvenir sheet which Canada Post had issued the day before to commemorate CAPEX. They were joined by Mitchell Gordon and Sylvain Cloutier, chairman of Canada Post.
Members of the audience lined up to obtain the signatures of Ripper and the other four men on the souvenirs they had received when they entered. These were: from USPS, special programs, each bearing the first ten stamps from the wildlife pane affixed to one of its pages and cancelled with a first-day postmark; and, from Canada Post, oversized envelopes bearing postmarked CAPEX souvenir sheets.
The U.S. Postal Service also gave its souvenir programs, complete with wildlife stamps and postmarks, to each CAPEX showgoer that first day, and on the second day as well, as long as the supply lasted - some 15,000 programs in all. And the Postal Service did a brisk business selling wildlife panes and stamps at its station on the exhibition floor and at the satellite sales units it had set up elsewhere in the Convention Centre for that first weekend of CAPEX.
The decision of the U. S. Postal Service to issue a pane of 50 stamps picturing the Wildlife of the 50 States grew out of two precedents, one long-standing, the other recent.
The earlier precedent - one which had been reaffirmed many times - was the issuance of stamps depicting mammals, birds, marine life and plants. This reflected a continuing interest in such stamps on the part of the mailing public.
The more recent precedent, established in 1976 and reinforced in 1982, involved the creation of panes of 50 stamps containing 50 different designs.
That 1976 set, picturing the Flags of the 50 States on horizontal commemorative-size stamps, was a dramatic new development in U.S. stamp production. The Postal Service considered such an innovation appropriate for the occasion - the climactic year of the celebration of the bicentennial of American independence.
The flags pane was followed six years later by a pane of vertical commemorative-size stamps depicting the 50 official state birds and flowers in full colors. More than any other issue of its time, this one demonstrated the high quality which the Postal Service and the Bureau of Engraving and Printing could bring to multicolor stamp work, despite the huge production quantities demanded by the U.S. postal system. It gave its creators full confidence, if any was needed, that projects of similar sweep and daring could be repeated whenever desired.
Predecessors of the Pane of 50 Wildlife Stamps
America's abundant wildlife has appeared on many U.S. stamps -sporadically at first, but with increasing frequency in the last two decades.
Strictly speaking, the first wildlife stamps were the 10-cent and 30-cent values of the 1869 pictorial series, which pictured the bald eagle in its role as the national bird.
The first stamp to feature wildlife as such, however, didn't appear for another 54 years. It was the 30-cent regular stamp of 1923 and it depicted a bison. Another 24 years then elapsed before another example of wildlife, the great white heron, was shown on a stamp commemorating the opening of Everglades National Park in 1947.
In 1956 and 1957, the wild turkey, pronghorn antelope, king salmon and whooping crane were depicted on four stamps promoting conservation. And beginning in the late 1960s, stamps picturing wildlife began appearing with some regularity, in singles, setenant blocks or booklets, usually in promotion of the themes of conservation and environmental protection.
In 1978, the U.S. Postal Service produced its most ambitious wildlife stamp issue up to that time. It was a souvenir sheet in honor of CAPEX '78, the international stamp exhibition in Toronto. The sheet contained eight 13-cent stamps, slightly smaller than standard-size adhesives and fully perforated, each showing a mammal or bird indigenous to the U.S.-Canadian border area: moose, chipmunk, red fox, raccoon, cardinal, mallard, Canada goose and blue jay. A branch of maple leaves in the marginal design saluted Canada and further carried out the nature theme.
The designer of the sheet was Stanley Galli of Kentsfield, California, who had previously done two wildlife conservation blocks of four in 1971-72 and a block depicting butterflies in 1977. The Bureau of Engraving and Printing printed it by a two-stage process on two sheet-fed presses: the Miller offset press and the Giori 1-8 intaglio (line-engraving) press.
That issue was eclipsed in concept and scope, of course, by the 1982 pane depicting the official bird and flower of each state.
The impetus for issuing this pane came from James A. Helzer, president of Unicover Corporation of Cheyenne, Wyoming, which produces Fleetwood philatelic products. Helzer had commissioned Arthur Singer of Jericho, N.Y., to paint 50 state bird-and-flower combinations for a sheet of stamp-sized labels which he then printed on his company's four-color Heidelberg offset press. He sent off the finished labels to the U.S. Postal Service as an example of what a similar set of postage stamps might look like.
Postmaster General William F. Bolger and other postal officials were impressed - and the end result was their decision to issue a state birds and flowers pane. A format different from that of Helzer's labels was needed, however, and new art required. Again, Arthur Singer was engaged to do the work; he painted the birds himself, and enlisted his son Alan, whose specialty is botanical painting, to add the flowers.
One of the few problems the project presented the veteran artist was finding a variety of poses and angles for birds that are officially claimed by more than one state. The seven cardinals, in particular, put his ingenuity to the test.
The Decision is Made to Issue 50 Wildlife Stamps
In the years after the birds and flowers stamps appeared, the Postal Service received scores of suggestions from the public for additional panes of 50 different stamps. State animals, state capitol buildings, wildflowers, aircraft - these were among the themes that turned up regularly.
However, the Citizens' Stamp Advisory Committee which makes formal recommendations to the Postmaster General on stamp subjects and designs - regarded these proposals as premature. In 1980, when the Committee had made its recommendation that the birds and flowers pane be issued in 1982, it had also reached a consensus that 50-stamp panes should be produced sparingly, no more frequently than once every five years.
Donald M. McDowell, general manager of the Postal Service's Stamp Division, noted that this consensus is far from being a "policy," which in Postal Service parlance is something put in writing and approved by the Postmaster General. "It's a practice, and it's evolved," he said. "It's probably still evolving ... How will the Committee be constituted next year, how will the members feel then? I don't know."
Thus, for the first part of the decade, the letters urging issuance of more such panes were noted and set aside. But by July 26, 1985, when the Committee convened at Postal Service headquarters on L'Enfant Plaza in Southwest Washington for one of its bimonthly meetings, enough time had elapsed so that it could seriously consider another 50-stamp issue. On the Committee's agenda at that meeting was one of the oft-received specific proposals - for a pane picturing the 50 state capitols.
When this agenda item was reached, the Postal Service staff shared with the Committee a market-research report on topical subjects provided by James A. Helzer of Unicover Corporation. It was part of a major survey Unicover had made of the interests of stamp collectors that also included preferences in countries, formats, collecting specialties and so on. The survey found that, among stamp subjects, the public liked wildlife best of all. Buildings were not as popular.
Out of the discussion that followed, the Committee decided to recommend issuance of a pane of 50 stamps in 1987 but wildlife, not state capitols. If the project should be approved by Postmaster General Paul Carlin, the Committee said, the Postal Service staff should develop a list of species for the members' consideration. The list should be widely diversified geographically, so that every state could claim at least one of the creatures depicted. Don McDowell explained the members' thinking.
"The appeal of the 50 state flags issue - other than for a relatively small number of people in the U. S. who are interested in flags themselves - was essentially 100 percent state pride," he said. "If you lived in Alabama, you had no particular appreciation for the Michigan flag unless you happened to be born there.
"With the birds and flowers issue, if you lived in Alabama, and Michigan had a beautiful bird and flower, you had the opportunity to appreciate both the stamps rather than just the one.
"So the desire was to make this new pane another broad-based appeal kind of issue, rather than the more limited state-appeal. Now, for that reason, it didn't try to turn into a 50-state-anything issue. It turned into 50 stamps that would have a great deal of appeal nationwide."
The Advisory Committee might have been inclined to follow the 50-state pattern one more time, except for one critical fact: Not all the states had official mammals, or, for that matter, official insects or amphibians.
"The Committee said, that being the case, what we should do from a pure market appeal point of view is make sure that everything that is on this sheet is in fact found in one or more states, and, if possible, let's get things that are found in multiple states," McDowell said. "So that if people want to identify with them, not on the basis of an official tie to statehood but on the basis of being able to look out their garden window, as it were, and seeing one of them, they could do so."
Postmaster General Carlin reacted to the proposal with enthusiasm and formally approved it in August, 1985.
The committee quickly decided whom it wanted for the job of developing the 50 stamp designs: Chuck Ripper.
Ripper is a free-lance wildlife artist from Huntington, West Virginia, with the kind of qualifications the Postal Service particularly appreciates. He is a fine craftsman who is known for the painstaking research he conducts on his subjects before he puts brush to paper. He worked for 12 years for a printing company before going free-lance, and fully understands the capabilities and limitations of gravure printing, which the Postal Service relies on for much of its multicolor stamp production.
Accustomed to working to customers' specifications and deadlines, Ripper has none of the "artistic temperament" that tends to resist requests and instructions from the commissioning agency. And he was particularly suited for the new project because he is a wildlife "generalist" (unlike Arthur and Alan Singer) who is equally at home painting mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and insects.
"We'd never had a Ripper wildlife issue that wasn't popular, that wasn't well done and that didn't print well," McDowell said.
The Postal Service had been particularly impressed by the brightness of the colors of gravure stamps made from Ripper paintings. That, says the artist, probably stems from his awareness born of experience that the halftone process - cutting up blocks of colors into tiny dots - automatically subtracts about one-tenth of a painting's contrast and strength, "and over the years, maybe it's subconscious, I've built a little more snap into my work to compensate for this so that you end up back where technically you ought to be."
Ripper was born in Evans City, Pennsylvania, north of Pittsburgh, the day before the stock market crash of 1929. He lived with both art and wildlife from his earliest years; his father, a blacksmith, painted rural scenes as a hobby, and young Chuck went along on these expeditions, "chasing frogs and butterflies while my dad painted." Later, in place of football and baseball, he was absorbed by nature. He hunted, fished and trapped, and even tried his hand at taxidermy.
In high school, he sketched the creatures he saw in the woods and fields. He realized, however, that starting his career as a nature painter held little prospect of success, so he elected to go into commercial art. After two years at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, 1947 to 1949, he went to work for the Carnegie Museum in that city doing illustrations for its publications. Before he was 20 he had also illustrated his first nature book, "Song of the Seasons," written for pre-teenagers and published by the William Morrow Company of New York.
Drafted into the Army during the Korean War, Ripper was lucky enough to be assigned to the Corps of Engineers, preparing maps of stateside military installations. After his discharge in 1953, he got married - his bride, Virginia Ogle, was a girl he met at the USO while he was stationed at Camp Leonard Wood, Missouri - and he needed a steady source of income, so he joined Standard Printing & Publishing Company in Huntington as art director.
Since then, he and Virginia have raised three daughters: Elisabeth (Kelly) and twins, Janet (Chambers) and Joy. Elisabeth, like her father, is a wildlife artist, whose clients include the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the National Wildlife Federation.
During his 12-year stint with Standard Printing, Ripper continued to do free-lance jobs on the side, including writing and illustrating eight more children'-s nature books. With that experience, and a small but growing reputation, he felt confident enough in 1965 to leave the full-time job and strike out on his own.
Since then, he has filled a wide variety of assignments out of the den-studio of his modest but comfortable home in a Huntington residential neighborhood. Huntington is a small city, and within easy reach of Ripper's home are woods, fields, lakes, creeks, the Ohio River -places where he hunts and fishes and hikes and photographs and does much of the open-air research for his paintings.
Among other things, he has produced some 75 magazine covers for wildlife magazines, seven covers for L.L. Bean catalogs, decks of playing cards, numerous greeting cards. He illustrated two of the "field guide" book series originated by famed bird painter Roger Tory Peterson - one for flowers of the Pacific Coast, which required 1,492 different paintings and drawings and took 4 1/2 years to complete, and another of similar magnitude for flowers of the Southwest. In addition, he sells original paintings, in oil, acrylic or watercolor, in a business which is largely word-of-mouth; Huntington has no gallery where such work could be displayed for sale.
Ripper embarked on the path that would lead him to postage stamp design in 1959, when he first designed some of the stamp-like labels which the National Wildlife Federation issues in sheets each year to raise funds. "I caught the Federation at a good time, when some of the people who had been doing works for them were getting famous or busy or they didn't think the money was quite enough," he said. "The sheets are a little mix of birds, flowers, mammals, fish, the whole works. I found these 5-by-7-inch or 7-by-10-inch paintings comfortable and easy to do, and I like detail work. There's 36 stamps on a sheet and one year I had 16 of the 36, and there's been a couple of years when I've maybe had only one or two. They actually get the paintings ahead of time, kind of build an inventory, and then their design coordinator and Roger Peterson, the Federation's unofficial art director, sit down and they make up a sheet. I guess over the years I've probably done 350 stamp paintings for them.
"It's been good to me in that it's forced me to do some things, branch out a little bit. If you want to stay busy, you can't say 'I'm just going to paint birds.' It's nice, but the real world isn't that way."
Ripper "branched out" further than he could have imagined with his first Postal Service assignment. He was recommended by Roger Tory Peterson to Peterson's Connecticut neighbor, Stevan Dohanos, then a design coordinator for the Stamp Advisory Committee. Dohanos was a distinguished painter and a past chairman of the committee who personally designed a total of 34 U.S. postage stamps during his career. Early one morning Dohanos phoned Ripper to ask whether he would be interested in designing a set of four stamps depicting coral reefs.
"I said, 'I'm a bird man and a West Virginian and you're talking coral reefs and that's really not my specialty,"' Ripper recalled. "He said, 'Well, it's not anybody's specialty.' " Ripper accepted, and after some lengthy and absorbing research at the Smithsonian Institution and elsewhere, he produced the paintings of corals and fish swimming among them that decorated the 1980 block of four.
Subsequently, Ripper designed the 1981 block of four showing Wildlife Habitats, the 1982 13-cent postcard-rate Christmas stamp picturing a kitten and puppy, the 1984 stamp depicting freshwater fauna that commemorated the Louisiana World Exposition, and the 1986 booklet pane of five different fish stamps.
These assignments - and even the work he did for the Wildlife Federation - were elementary compared to the task of doing 50 different designs in one bite for the Postal Service. Had he ever tackled anything that ambitious before?
"Yes, at least twice," Ripper said. "Years ago a friend from New Jersey who was a printing salesman drummed up a job with the candy division of Nabisco, which made a little old caramel sucker called a Sugar Daddy and a Sugar Mamma, one of those things guaranteed to lift your fillings that the kids like. They got in the habit of sticking a little pack of cards in with these suckers, and my friend called up and asked, 'Would you like to do a series of these featuring baby animals, 50 of them?' I said, 'Sure."'
The paintings had to be done in the actual size of the finished cards - 31/8 by 8 inches - and, in addition to being small, these were inconvenient dimensions, suitable for alligators and giraffes, but not for more compact creatures. In some cases, Ripper had to settle for showing less than the full subject. He also provided the text for the back of the cards, and completed 50 in about four months.
The series was so popular that the next year he was asked to do another 50 called "animal heroes." "The earthworm's a hero because he aerates the soil," Ripper explained. "The turkey vulture's a hero because he cleans up the carrion, and so on. I had to be a little creative in this respect. The first 25 were easy and they got more difficult near the end.
"So, as you see, I'm not opposed to wading in to monumental projects."
Developing the List of 50 Subjects
With the Advisory Committee's choice of Ripper in hand, the Stamps Division's Don McDowell assigned Jack Williams, a program manager for philatelic design, to be art director for the wildlife pane. The two men placed a call to the artist to tell him what the Postal Service had in mind.
Because of the popular success of the birds and flowers pane, they said, the Committee wanted the new stamps to be in the same commemorative size and vertical format. Finished paintings would be needed, in groups of 10, over the course of the next year, aiming at 1987 issuance of the pane. Was he interested?
Ripper was, and quickly accepted the assignment. On August 30, 1985, he signed a-contract to design the 50 stamps for the standard Postal Service art fee, which is $1,500 for a single design, $1,250 for each of a block of four and $1,000 each for groups of five or more designs. Ripper's fee was $50,000 for the 50 designs; it was the same amount that Arthur and Alan Singer had received for the birds and flowers in 1982.
During their initial call McDowell and Williams asked the artist to prepare, as a starting point, a list of 50 possible subjects, covering all parts of the United States, that they could take back to the Advisory Committee.
The Committee had decided from the beginning to go beyond birds and mammals and consider insects, crustaceans and other forms of fauna. "They specified wildlife in its broadest sense," McDowell said. "If it wasn't vegetable or mineral it was fair game, pardon the pun, for this issue."
Chuck and Virginia Ripper sat down with the field guides and other reference works to draw up the requested list. When they were finished, it read as follows:
Gray squirrel, blue jay, river otter, black bear, bighorn sheep, bald eagle, deer mouse, luna moth, black-tail jack rabbit, osprey, monarch (butterfly), woodchuck, pronghorn antelope, snowy egret;
Beaver, wolverine, armadillo, scarlet tanager, mountain goat, red fox, barn swallow, badger, Eastern chipmunk, gray wolf, red-winged blackbird, raccoon, tiger swallowtail butterfly, roseate spoonbill, bobcat, Canada goose, white-tailed deer, herring gull;
Ringtail, moose, black-footed ferret, wild turkey, American lobster, Alaska brown bear, bobwhite, pika, wood duck, mountain lion, cottontail, iiwi, mule deer, California sea lion, mallard, bison, prairie dog, American elk.
The Postal Service staff sent copies of the list to Advisory Committee members so they would be ready to begin discussions at their November meeting. In the meantime, the Committee's Topical Subcommittee, headed by Mary Ann Owens of Brooklyn, made a preliminary study of the list to determine which species had appeared previously on U.S. postage stamps.
The Advisory Committee's position on "repeaters" was to be aware of such cases but not to ban them outright. "It's a funny thing about stamps and philately as contrasted to stamps and the general public," Don McDowell said. "If the general public thinks the Canada goose is a magnificent bird and doesn't really get tired of seeing beautiful renditions of Canada geese they won't turn back and say to you, 'why, you did one seven years ago.' It's only the stamp collector who does that."
Beginning at that November 1985 meeting, Ripper's suggested list was the subject of extended discussion and debate within the Advisory Committee. The Committee tentatively decided on substitutions, but in many cases it changed its collective mind and went back to the original selections. Meantime, Jack Williams stayed in frequent telephone communication with the artist, apprising him of the process and getting his comments.
In the end, of the 50 species which Chuck and Virginia Ripper had originally nominated, 46 got the Committee's approval to go on the pane - "far more than I ever expected," Ripper admitted.
In place of the Rippers' wild turkey, mallard, wood duck, and herring gull, the committee ultimately prescribed a hummingbird, ladybug, box turtle, and mockingbird.
The process of working over the list stretched over several meetings. It was highly subjective, and to a greater extent than other design selection exercises it permitted the Committee members to indulge their personal likes and dislikes.
"The members looked at the list and asked themselves all sorts of questions," McDowell said. "A member is partial to a particular animal; that animal isn't on the list; he proposes that it go on the list; the rest of them vote. If they agree, they put it on and take something off. That's the way a committee works. "
"Some of it," added Williams, "was just, 'we think a turtle would look prettier than so-and-so' - that sort of thing. We asked them to keep in mind the overall concept, that we're not talking about individual paintings here, we're talking about a sheet of 50 stamps that must work well together."
Jack Williams' notes taken during the selection process illustrate the fluid nature of that process. In February 1986, for example, theCommittee decided to drop Ripper's wild turkey, mallard, bighorn sheep, bald eagle, moose, bison, and pika, and substitute a hummingbird, a turtle, a wild boar, a second moth, a frog or toad, a snail, and a crocodile. From this group, only the hummingbird and turtle made the finals. At another point, the Committee asked for an alligator, coyote, and sea otter; none of these reached the ultimate list.
In some cases, practical problems pointed out by Ripper and Williams helped the Committee decide. For instance, an alligator or crocodile is an elongated horizontal creature and wouldn't fit in the vertical stamp format unless it was pictured head-on * an unappealing view, particularly if the mouth was open and teeth gleaming.
This question of how the stamp-using public would react to specific creatures was very much on the Committee's mind, and it led to some highly speculative discussion. "There are people who break out in a cold sweat at the picture of a snake," McDowell said. "Snakes are reptiles. Does that sort of concern extend all the way to turtles? Is the turtle, because it's a reptile, going to be perceived as a reptile or a turtle? Well, there was a discussion and the consensus was no, people don't get horrified at turtles. "
The turtle's chief advocate on the Committee was Mary Ann Owens. A specialist in topical philately (she is the only American to win international gold medals with two different topical collections, one on elephants and the other on the Blue Danube), she pushed for the inclusion of other phyla besides birds and mammals. She also fought hard, she said, for the ladybug.
"A ladybug was never going to get on a U.S. stamp on its own merits, outside of a pane such as this one," Mrs. Owens said. "But insects are a very important part of the animal kingdom. Beetles on stamps, no - but a ladybug would sell. Everybody loves a ladybug."
Ripper had included three insects on his own list, of course)two butterflies and a moth. The Committee members, recalling the popular success of artist Stanley Galli's block of butterfly stamps in 1977, had no hesitation in endorsing them.
The Committee also took advantage of the opportunity presented by the wildlife pane to accommodate certain persistent stamp advocates.
"There's a group of folks that have been very politely tenacious over the years, wanting a wolf on a stamp," McDowell said. "They think the wolf has gotten a bad rap, and they think that wolves ought to be more protected than they are. The Committee took that into consideration."
The armadillo had frequently been proposed by people in the Southwest, and now they, too, would have their stamp. The Committee also hoped that inclusion of the woodchuck would at least partly satisfy the Pennsylvanians who had sought postal recognition of Punxsutawney Phil, the groundhog (another name for woodchuck) whose emergence from his burrow in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, to look for his shadow is a major media event each February 1.
Still another tireless advocacy group had been the Committee on Beautification and Environment, an agency of the city of Miami, Florida. Each year, in late May and early June, the Committee stages the 10-day-long Royal Poinciana Fiesta to celebrate the royal poinciana, a flowering tree with immense clusters of brilliant red blossoms. Since 1972 Helen Eidson, a member of the Committee, had urged the Postal Service to issue a commemorative stamp picturing the tree in full bloom. In recent years the full Beautification Committee took up the campaign, enlisting local politicians and civic leaders, members of Congress, and ordinary citizens in writing to the Postal Service.
The subject had always seemed too narrow-based to merit a separate stamp, but now the chance was at hand to at least partly satisfy the poinciana lovers. By a happy coincidence, 1987 would be the year of the 50th annual Fiesta. The Citizens' Advisory Committee asked Chuck Ripper to use the flower as a backdrop for a bird on one of the wildlife stamps. It would be the one stamp of the 50 on the pane in which the flora dictated the fauna - or at least the range of possible fauna.
Ripper pointed out that because the flower was so showy, the bird that went with it could be of any plumage, so long as it was indigenous to southern Florida. He suggested that the Advisory Committee consult with the National Geographic Society or Smithsonian Institution and make its own choice. That is how the mockingbird arrived on the list)a somewhat surprising selection in light of the fact the same bird had appeared five times on the 1982 birds and flowers pane as the state bird of Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Texas.
The wildlife stamps' scheduled issue date fell just a few days too late for Miami to incorporate the mockingbird/poinciana stamp into its 1987 Fiesta. However, a large color blowup of the stamp was featured prominently at the May 31 opening of the Royal Poinciana Postal Station, at which the official Fiesta pictorial cancellation was first used on mail. And another program was scheduled for June 15)after the festival)at the University of Miami, at which the stamp itself, and the rest of the wildlife pane, would be the centerpiece.
Helen Eidson, for her part, made the trip to CAPEX '87 June 13 for the first day sale of the wildlife pane. She and the Beautification Committee were delighted, she said, that the royal poinciana was at last being postally recognized)and in the year of the 50th celebration, at that. But she made it clear that they would still campaign for a separate stamp showing the full tree in all its beauty. "They haven't heard the last of us," she promised.
In ordering a hummingbird for the wildlife pane, the Citizens' Advisory Committee left the specific kind up to the artist. Chuck Ripper was cognizant of the need to give the West its full share of representation in the set, so he passed up the ruby-throat, the only hummingbird native to the East, and selected the broad-tailed variety, which he had come to know during summer trips to Colorado.
"It's very common out there," he said. "The male has a whistle on its wing when it flies. You hear these things whistling around all over the place, and that's only half the population, so there must be a jillion of the little critters."
The entire selection process was highly educational for the Advisory Committee and the Stamps Division. Some of the creatures on Ripper's list had been unknown to them. One was the iiwi (pronounced ee-wee), which the artist selected as a representative of Hawaii.
"A lot of birds in Hawaii are things that people have brought from home back in the early years to remind them of home, so we had to scratch around a little bit for native species," Ripper said. "This bird is one of the original birds, although it's unfortunately being crowded out by some of the species brought in, like the starling. It's snappy, and has color * red. Some of the birds over there are yellowish or lime green."
After the Postal Service announced the final list, a writer for a Sunday newspaper supplement telephoned Ripper. "She asked, 'What's this eye-wee? What kind of animal is it?' I said, 'No, that's a bird.' I pronounced it for her. Two hours later she called back and said, 'Is that the bird that doesn't fly?' She was thinking of the kiwi! I said, 'No, don't do that to me. This one flies.'
"If that selection will stir up some interest in the native species in Hawaii, we'll have done even more good than we intended."
Ripper also threw the Committee a curve with the "pica" he included on his original list. Williams was unable to find it in his encyclopedia. "I had misspelled it," Ripper said. "The correct spelling is 'pika.' I'm an old printer, and I may have subconsciously been thinking of the 'pica/ which is a unit of measure in printing."
The final list, in the order in which the subjects appear on the pane from upper left to lower right, and with the accompanying plant listed where it is identifiable:
Barn swallow, monarch (with field thistle), bighorn sheep, broad-tailed hummingbird (with Colorado columbine), cottontail (with red clover), osprey, mountain lion, luna moth (with trumpet honeysuckle), mule deer, gray squirrel (with red oak).
Armadillo (with Texas prickly pear), Eastern chipmunk (with European white birch), moose, black bear, tiger swallowtail (with orange milkweed), bobwhite (with purple coneflower), ringtail (with Cape marigold), red-winged blackbird (with common cattail), American lobster, black-tailed jack rabbit (with beavertail).
Scarlet tanager (with American basswood), woodchuck (with common dandelion), roseate spoonbill (with red mangrove), bald eagle, Alaskan brown bear, iiwi (with ohia lehua), badger, pronghorn, river otter, ladybug (with cultivated rose).
Beaver (with maple and quaking aspen), white-tailed deer, blue jay (with table mountain pine), pika, bison, snowy egret, gray wolf, mountain goat, deer mouse, black-tailed prairie dog.
Box turtle (with Virginia creeper), wolverine, American elk, California sea lion, mockingbird (with roual poinciana), raccoon, bobcat, black-footed ferret, Canada goose, red fox (with red maple).
As the Committee had done many times in the past, it turned to Bradbury Thompson of Riverside, Connecticut, for the typography. Thompson, a graphic innovator and prolific designer of magazines and books, has been on the faculty of the Yale School of Art and Architecture since 1956 and a member of the Citizens' Stamp Advisory Committee since 1969. He has designed many stamps himself and supervised the preparation of many others as a design coordinator.
The typography on the 1982 state birds and flowers pane, which so brilliantly complemented the Singers' paintings, had been his creation. For the new wildlife pane, he used a similar format and typeface combination to provide a frame within which Ripper would work. Again, as with the birds and flowers, he combined the classic Roman face, Sabon Antiqua * one of his favorites * for the country name and denomination, and an italic version of the classic Italian face, Bembo, for the name of the species.
Thompson placed the denomination and the initials "USA" in the upper left-hand corner. The numerals were prominent, in keeping with a recently-adopted Postal Service policy that the denomination must be at least twice the size of the "USA" and, on 50-stamp panes, never less than 3/16th of an inch high, so postal clerks and postal patrons can read them easily. For working purposes, he used a double zero, because at that time the first-class rate at the time of the stamps' issuance couldn't be predicted. Along the left side, reading up, Thompson put the English name of the species, in upper and lower-case letters.
Early on, well before the final list of species had been determined, Ripper made a finished painting of the gray squirrel to serve as a prototype. He was influenced in this choice by the regular presence of a female gray squirrel on the window sill of his den, a few inches from his drawing board. "She's in the yard every day," he said. "There are no oak trees right around here, but we put out sunflower seeds for her."
Ripper's method on this and the paintings that followed was to make a pencil drawing of the subject in the size of the finished art - 411/4 inches wide by 7 1/4 inches deep, or five times stamp size. (Bradbury Thompson had sent him a set of four transparent overlays made to this scale, containing four different species names of varying length, plus "00 USA," all in their proper positions, so Ripper could calculate how much space he would have to work with for each stamp.)
Ripper then took a piece of tracing paper whose back had been blackened with graphite from a regular No. 2 writing pencil, and inserted it between the drawing and his painting surface, which was watercolor paper mounted on a thick illustration board. With a sharp pencil he traced over the lines of his drawing, creating a "carbon copy" on the watercolor paper.
Then, applying gouache, or opaque watercolor, from tubes with pointed sable brushes, he created his painting over the transferred drawing. "Gouache is the meat and potatoes of the illustrator's field," Ripper said. "The detail is unlimited. If you want to come back and lighten an area, you can put light over dark. You can put the midrib down the tailfeather, or lighten the edge of a feather, or put the highlight in the eye, which you can't do with regular transparent watercolor. In regular watercolor you're supposed to either paint around that highlight or cut it out with a knife.
"With gouache you have some of the advantages of oil and acrylic without having to wait an eternity for it to dry."
Ripper painted his squirrel scampering down the limb of a red oak tree, bushy tail flaunted, against a sky-blue background. The Advisory Committee was pleased with the result, but after discussion, it decided it preferred to have no color behind the lettering and denomination, so Ripper painted the blue out. The artist then did three more prototypes: the blue jay, an adult and young specimen perched in a pine tree; two monarchs on a thistle; and a woodchuck sitting upright beside its burrow. The committee's response, again, was enthusiastic.
Chuck Ripper's original series of pencil sketches gave the Citizens' Advisory Committee the exact sense of the completed work.
At this point, the Committee decided it wanted an idea of how the entire pane would look. So Ripper * still working with his own original proposed fist of 50 subjects * undertook to demonstrate, with a series of 50 rough pencil sketches, done to actual stamp size.
"Normally I would have just taken them one at a time, or a strip at a time," Ripper said. "But in this case, I had to go and kind of do the preliminary research, collecting the photographs I had and what I was going to need for all of them, so that I could work out my poses and make up this sheet.
"I got 50 manila folders and labeled each one of them and put the research material in. Then I started doodling around with these little rough thumbnails, playing around with the composition so that (1) they don't all look alike and (2) roughly half the species are looking to the right and half to the left."
The resulting series of pencil sketches, arranged in a stamp-pane form 10 across and five deep, gave the Committee exactly the sense it had wanted of the completed work. Ripper got the go-ahead to proceed with his next step - the 4 ¼ by 7 ¼ inch working drawings.
It was during the creation of the stamp-size sketches that Ripper came to grips with his toughest problem. That was to find poses that were varied, original, and at the same time accurate.
"Some of these species have been painted so often that it's hard to come up with a fresh pose and approach, in the confines of the space," he said. "As a friend of mine says, a bird artist, 'All the good poses have been done; you've got left and right, front and back, and back's not very interesting.' So it's a challenge, on the more popular species, to come up with something that hasn't been done umpteen times.
"In a number of cases, you'll notice I've come up with almost a three-quarter view simply because with an animal that's fairly long, on a vertical stamp, that makes your subject so much smaller. You'll see on the elk and the fox (broadside views, but with the heads turned back), they look similar in pose, but again, you don't have that many options.
"You can't get too complicated. If you're doing an 8½ by 12 inch magazine cover, it's bigger, you've got more air, you can have a jack rabbit jumping across a bush or something, but you can't get too complicated in your composition on a small format like a stamp or it becomes a jumble of pieces. You kind of have to think simplicity and boldness."
The procedure which Ripper and Jack Williams developed was for him to do ten drawings, equivalent to a horizontal row on the pane, and send these in for comments, suggestions, and approval before he committed them to paint. "In one or two cases, I would resubmit a sketch if there was any major change," Ripper said. "We were just trying to eliminate as many problems as we could in this early stage. This is the time, if you're going to change, when you want to do the changing."
The Postal Service had retained a research consultant, Helen Wadsworth, who in turn showed the drawings to wildlife experts, particularly those at the Smithsonian Institution. The consultant relayed comments and questions to Williams, who in turn took them up with Ripper.
"They suggested some minor changes," Williams recalled. "Such as, 'The paws don't look exactly right on this,' or 'The tail should be elevated a little bit more' and in general we made all those changes. The Smithsonian people did things like count feathers on wings. In one instance, the osprey, there appeared to be five wing feathers on the left and four on the right. So we sent that back to Chuck and he worked with it and put the appearance of another feather in there, which satisfied the bird person at the Smithsonian. We sort of drew the line, though, if it would detract from Chuck's art as long as he was anatomically correct and wasn't depicting anything incorrectly.
"The pose of the animal as he saw it or had photographed it was judged to be important."
The upright stance of the woodchuck, in particular, was questioned by one of the experts, who ventured that it was "non-typical. " Ripper met the challenge successfully by sending Williams several examples of published photographs showing upright woodchucks. The artist described the victory with a smile.
"In my younger days, during World War 11, meat was scarce," he said. "Woodchucks are edible, and as a country boy, I've had some dealings with them over the years, and I said, 'Hey, folks, trust me on this.' I liked the standing-up pose because it fit the stamp proportions better, and I wasn't going to let them tell me it was 'non-typical.'
"In a lot of institutions, there are a lot of people studying preserved specimens in formaldehyde bottles and they forget about the field work. They are so involved in measuring length of hair on toes they miss the typical. Standing up? A woodchuck's life depends on his standing up and seeing."
The Committee itself questioned the pose of the gray wolf, which Ripper showed leaping over the limb of a fallen tree. "Someone said, 'Gosh, that just looks too domesticated,"' Don McDowell remembered. "'That looks like my dog jumping over a fence, and I can't believe that a wolf would hold its front paws in that dainty position.' Chuck sent us a large photograph from Life magazine of a wolf jumping over a tree limb - and the conclusion was, at least one wolf jumped that way!"
The Postal Service consultant raised a rather delicate question after receiving Ripper's drawing of the bighorn sheep, a male specimen on which a part of the testicles showed behind the hind leg. She appended a note, with an arrow pointing to the spot, that read: "Is this supposed to be genitals? If so, does it present any kind of political problem or question of consistency re. the other animals?" Once again Ripper backed up his art work with a magazine photograph, and the Advisory Committee soberly concluded that making the bighorn true to life would create no particular "political problem" - i.e., it wouldn't offend the public.
Ripper worked from live specimens whenever possible. He caught a tiger swallowtail near his home and therefore was able, as he told Williams, to "stand by my spots and specks" when the experts questioned the pattern of the butterfly's wings. He showed a visitor a set of color photographs he had taken of an Eastern box turtle which his son-in-law had procured for him. "The turtle was a little bit drab," he said, "so I took some baby oil and rubbed it on his shell before I took his picture. That brings out the pattern more clearly and shows the texture of the shell. These ridges are just like the rings in a tree; they're related to age.
"The turtle was quite cooperative. Some of the subjects are tough to work with when they're alive. They either have that scared-to-death look, which you don't want in your painting, or they tear you up. Cardinals, for instance - real mean birds. I tried to handle a cardinal one time, and he got hold of a piece of skin that really made my eyes water!"
For the lobster, Ripper's file photos were unsatisfactory, "so I went down to the local seafood store and photographed and sketched and did what I had to do, and then we had him for supper."
Ripper never misses an opportunity to add to his knowledge. He produced a color photo he had made of a dead flicker (a species that isn't included on the wildlife pane) which he had found, the victim of a run-in with an automobile, on his daily walk. "Give me an hour with a street casualty like this, with a sketch pad and a camera, and I'm going to get some things you don't see when the bird is flying overhead or running up and down a tree," he said. "All the 'study skins' in museums are preserved with the wings up tight against the body, but if you want to paint it flying, you have to know what the wing looks like, over and under, while extended."
In the end, there were only four instances in which Ripper made a major change in the pose of a species from the pose he had depicted in his original pencil sketch of the pane of 50: the mule deer, moose, red-winged blackbird, and raccoon. In addition, his final painting of the Canada goose showed an adult with a nest of eggs instead of the clutch of goslings he had originally sketched.
After the design process was well under way, the decision was made at the Postal Service to hold the first-day sale of the wildlife pane at CAPEX '87, and the Advisory Committee decided it would be appropriate to depict maple leaves in one or two of the designs, in recognition of Canada's national symbol. Accordingly, Ripper incorporated maples in the beaver and red fox paintings.
Once Ripper had embarked on the painting stage of a design, he encountered few problems. The actual painting work took, on the average, 2 1/2 days for each stamp. The two butterfly stamps took the longest to execute, because of the need for the artist to achieve precise symmetry on the creatures' outstretched wings. Painting was preceded, of course, by a period of research and sketching that varied in length. "Sometimes the pre-game stuff is more fun and challenging than the finished painting," Ripper said. "The more homework you do, the easier the painting goes. "
While working, he had to make certain his lighter-colored subjects had strong backgrounds so they could be seen clearly, and so he placed a towering mountain behind his mountain goat, a cypress stump behind his egret, and a few wisps of cloud behind the white head of his bald eagle.
At the Committee's request, Ripper returned to some paintings at the end to add design elements that would strengthen one or more of the four corners. "One of the common denominators we've found in good stamp design is that good stamps tend to have clearly defined corners," Don McDowell explained.
Ripper finished the last of his paintings near the end of September 1986. At the Advisory Committee's meeting in November, all 50 pieces of art were laid out for the members' inspection. Also present at that meeting was Postmaster General Preston R. Tisch, who expressed his complete satisfaction with the work.
A note from Jack Williams to Ripper, dated November 25, 1986, contained the final bits of fine-tuning of the paintings requested by the Advisory Committee.
"Moose: Add more clouds in the upper right corner.
"Ferret: Add something at the upper right. Clouds?
"Chipmunk: Add some vegetation or clouds in the upper right corner. More color is needed in that area.
"Iiwi: Can we add another flower or branch in the upper right corner?
"Hummingbird: The lavender flower above the bird's head is too pale. Please strengthen it.
"Spoonbill: Once again, more color at the right.
"Pronghorn: Add some clouds in the sky.
"Monarch: Something is needed in the upper right corner, and the green below that needs to be strengthened.
"Prairie dog: Add some clouds upper right.
"Osprey: Strengthen the green in the vegetation."
Said Williams: "He made those changes in the ten pieces of art and I had them back in less than a week."
While Ripper was turning out his paintings, Bradbury Thompson was overseeing the preparation of type for each of the 50 stamps. The lettering was set as phototype on clear transparent film for each stamp by Anagraphics Inc., a New York graphic design firm, under the supervision of John Boyd, himself a stamp designer, with the help of Ray Heinz. The size of the transparent overlays corresponded to the size of Ripper's finished artwork, and the type film, fitted precisely over the painting, completed the stamp design.
The nomenclature of the 50 species followed Ripper's own preferred version in all but a handful of cases. "Pronghorn antelope" was shortened to "pronghorn" because, as McDowell said, "technically, from a zoologist's point of view, the pronghorn isn't an antelope." (Ironically, the previous U.S. stamp depicting this mammal, in the conservation series of 1956-57, had used the name "pronghorn antelope.") Ripper's letter-heavy "tiger swallowtail butterfly" was similarly shortened to "tiger swallowtail. "
A "Workhorse" Printing Press is Chosen
In planning the wildlife issue, the Postal Service worked closely from the beginning with top officials of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, as it does with all stamp issues. The director of the Bureau, Robert Leuver, is a voting member of the Advisory Committee. Technical advisers to the Committee include Ralph Payne, manager of the Bureau's Production Scheduling and Control Division; Leonard Buckley, the Bureau's foreman of designers, and Edward R. Felver, who heads the agency's engraving section. Don McDowell works particularly closely with Payne on production matters, and the two frequently phone each other or visit each other's offices, a few blocks apart, to swap information and advice and talk out problems.
This kind of cooperation wasn't always the norm. "A few years ago," recalled Howard Paine, a design coordinator for the Advisory Committee, "we didn't talk to each other. We ask them (the Bureau) now. They have almost a veto if we show them art and they say, that's going to be a tough one to do.
Added McDowell: "The Post Office Department (predecessor of the Postal Service) would send a design to the Bureau. Some time later the Bureau would send them some stamps. We had strictly a procurement relationship. We bought stamps the way we bought floor wax.
"But you cannot set the production operation out there in splendid isolation and never talk to them and never let them tell you what they can and can't do, or invite you to tell them what you might want to do next year so they can get the mechanical capabilities to do it for you."
The Postal Service briefly considered printing the wildlife stamps on the Bureau's "D" press, a state-of-the-art unit completed in 1984 and capable of producing stamps in a combination of up to six offset colors and three intaglio (engraved) colors in a single operation. Offset provides faithful reproduction of multicolor art; intaglio emphasizes line and detail and adds the security element needed to guard against counterfeiting.
But it was decided instead to turn once again to the Andreotti seven-color gravure press, a workhorse of the Bureau that had been in operation since 1971 and had a long list of stamp credits that included the 1982 birds and flowers pane.
Gravure, usually called photogravure in the stamp catalogs, is technically a kind of intaglio, but instead of engraved lines on a copper printing cylinder, it relies on depressions, or cells, to hold the ink. The original artwork is photographed through a screen which breaks it up into patterns of dots, and those dots are then etched with acid onto the cylinder to create the cells.
The Andreotti press produces stamps by the process color method, in which dots of yellow, magenta, cyan (greenish-blue), and black are laid down in sequence by individual cylinders in tiny rosettes that blend to deceive the eye with the appearance of full color. For the wildlife stamps, a fifth cylinder, also black, would be used for the lettering; a sixth cylinder, not needed for color, would apply an invisible phosphor called "tagging" to the stamps that is needed to activate the automatic facer-canceller machines used in mail processing.
For commemorative-size stamps like the wildlife issue, the cylinders contain 200 subjects each and print on a continuous web of paper that is afterward cut into sheets, perforated and further cut into the panes of 50 that are shipped to the post offices.
The choice of the Andreotti was made for several reasons. Gravure is the most cost-effective method available for stamps with long production runs, which was a persuasive argument, considering that the wildlife issue was expected to prove very popular and would need a larger printing than for the average commemorative. The "D" press was already heavily booked for 1987 for stamps for which its unique capabilities were clearly needed. One was the Girl Scout commemorative, which showed a merit badge sash on which the offset color was nicely complemented by the engraved lines on the badges. Another was the lace-making block of four, in which for the first time highly-detailed intaglio work was printed in white ink over a solid offset color background.
Finally, the skill of the artist was a major factor. Chuck Ripper's understanding of gravure, and his past success in designing for it, was well known to the Postal Service. "This is not to say Chuck can't do something that would print beautifully in the other process," Don McDowell said. "But would you have asked Rembrandt to work in watercolors as opposed to oils, just because watercolors are on the market?"
The confidence felt by the Stamp Division, the Advisory Committee and the Bureau that Ripper's work would be faithfully translated into postage stamps was not without basis. Over the long life of the Andreotti press, its users have learned a lot about extracting its full potential for quality work.
In the early years, the Andreotti was coupled to a perforator that intercepted the printed web as it emerged from the cylinders, sliced the web into panes of stamps and applied the perforations. This "on-line" perforating system was considered efficient. But in order to allow the perforator, a mechanical function, to keep pace with the printing, the press had to be run at about 350 to 400 meters a minute, well under its maximum speed of 600. The result, Bureau officials eventually concluded, was inefficiency. They realized that if the Andreotti could perform at its designed speed, it would print better because centrifugal force would help empty the color cells of their ink; quality would improve, spoilage would go down, and so would costs.
So the Bureau uncoupled the perforator from the press - in effect, took off the brake - and replaced it with a reel stand that rewinds the web after it is printed. The web is then taken to a separate area to be sliced and perforated on the Eureka-stroke perforator, which produces bull's-eye perforations at the corners of each stamp. The result, in terms of enhanced printing quality, has been just what was predicted.
"Good as the birds and flowers stamps were in 1982," Don McDowell said, "I'd dearly love to get my hands on the Singers' art again and print it today. I'd dearly love to get my hands on ANY 1976 gravure effort. A lot has changed."
Arranging the Stamps on the "Sheet"
Bureau officials were closely involved with the Advisory Committee in the final step of the planning process for the wildlife stamps: arranging the individual stamps on the pane.
With no tie-in between stamps and individual states, there was no need for the kind of arbitrary arrangement used with the state flags pane (order of admission to the union, working from upper left to lower right) and birds and flowers pane (alphabetically by state, again starting in the upper left). Therefore, the arrangement would be influenced by a combination of practical and subjective factors.
Chuck Ripper, as we have seen, proposed an ordering of his own, based mainly on a desire to vary the positions and directions of the subjects. That concern was also present in Washington, but so were others.
This final planning sequence began when the Postal Service sent Ripper's 50 paintings to the Bureau with a request for a model. Designer Esther F. Porter was assigned to prepare the model under the supervision of Leonard Buckley.
The model's purpose is to let the Postal Service see, as accurately as possible, what the finished stamp - or, in this case, pane of stamps - will look like before the actual platemaking and printing take place. The Office of Engraving photographed each of Ripper's paintings and made a stamp-size color print ("C print") of each one. These were then arranged in the form of a pane of 50 stamps, ten across by five deep, and pasted down. At the same time, a transparent overlay was made, containing positive photo reductions of the 50 different pieces of film that contained the type for each stamp. This overlay was also marked with horizontal and vertical rows of dots representing perforations, just as they would appear on the finished pane of stamps. The overlay was placed over the layout of C prints, and the resulting package constituted the model.
The Bureau, in creating its own layout, strove as Ripper did to vary the positions and directions of the creatures depicted. However, it also had to take care to arrange the individual color prints so that the process colors would be evenly distributed across the pane, making sure that cyan, for instance, wasn't concentrated in one area and magenta in another. Otherwise, the feed of ink from the "fountains" on the press would be adversely affected. As a result, its arrangement differed significantly from the artist's.
The model was sent to the Postal Service, which in turn referred it to the Advisory Committee. The Committee applied its collective aesthetic sense to the Bureau's proposed arrangement and made a few minor changes for better balance of design or color. Back at the Bureau, the appropriate switches of position among the color prints were made, and the transparent overlay bearing the type and simulated perforations was redone so that words and pictures would again match up.
"With something like this, you don't really know when to stop tinkering with it," Don McDowell admitted. "When have you stopped making improvements and started tinkering just for tinkering's sake? Had production schedules not required that we freeze it, I'll bet you we could have gone into every meeting of the Committee for a year and some member of the Committee or member of the staff would have wanted to move something to another spot on the pane."
In the end, only one of Ripper's designs stayed in the same spot in which he had first placed it - the luna moth, stamp no. 8 in the top row.
The final version of the model went to Postmaster General Tisch, who gave it his approval and signature early in 1987.
The Wildlife Stamps are Printed
The Bureau of Engraving and Printing runs a round-the-clock operation to meet the demands of its governmental clients. In 1987 it was scheduled to print more than 36 billion stamps for the Postal Service, including 11 billion 22-cent stamps showing the American flag over the Capitol in coils of 100, 1.6 billion of the same stamps in coils of 500, and 7 billion seashell stamps in booklets of 20.
Staying on top of such a program - which also encompasses dozens of other definitive stamps, officials and airmails, specials such as the Love and Christmas stamps, the nondenominated "alphabet" stamps which the Postal Service must keep in reserve for temporary use after a rate change, and the wildlife and 27 other commemorative stamps announced for 1987 requires precise scheduling at all points of the production process, and then close supervision to make sure schedules are followed. No equipment can be allowed to stand idle longer than absolutely necessary. The man responsible for overseeing all this activity is Ralph Payne, the Bureau's production manager.
Payne had scheduled the Andreotti press to begin producing wildlife commemoratives Tuesday, April 1, 1987. The initial print order from the Postal Service was for 10 million panes, or 500 million stamps; this was increased to 600 million March 30. Of these, some 19 million were selected for centering and put aside for philatelic sales.
Once the Bureau's Office of Engraving knew where each stamp would be positioned on the plate, it could proceed to make the color separations that would be used to create the plates, or cylinders, that would print the stamps. The separations - one for each of the process colors - were made for each stamp individually. These were then used to create the patterns of ink-holding cells on the appropriate cylinders. On the cylinder made for the lettering and numerals, the cells that would receive the black ink were enclosed by very fine etched lines, to outline the characters and give them sharper definition. This refinement of the gravure process had been used earlier with success on the Alfred Verville airmail stamp of 1985.
The dot pattern for each stamp was repeated four times on each cylinder, through use of a so-called step-and-repeat machine, because each individual stamp design would appear four times on the large sheets of 200 which the cylinders would print.
"Proving" cylinders were made first. Each of these cylinders was etched with the complete 200-stamp layout for two of the process colors (one on either side). To create a cylinder proof, impressions were made from each of the cylinders, magenta, cyan, yellow, black, and black typography - each impression superimposed on the ones that had preceded it.
Bureau personnel, under Leonard Buckley's supervision, then matched the completed proof against the original art to make sure the colors were true. Where a color deviation was found, the remedy was not to change the ink - each of the four inks constituted a single "identity" that had to be used for all the stamps - but to delicately alter the dot pattern on the negative from which the cylinder was made so that the resulting cell system would lay down more or less of that ink than before.
Another cylinder proof was then made, and found to be satisfactory. The way was clear for the Bureau to begin manufacturing production cylinders in the Cylinder and Sleeve Section of its Office of Engraving.
One set of five printing cylinders - one each per process color, plus lettering - was made. The cylinders were coppered, then etched, and afterward covered with a chrome coating 3/ 10,000th of an inch thick to resist wear. (This chroming would have to be repeated periodically during the press run.)
Marginal markings for the selvage of each pane included the cylinder numbers - 11111 - which comprised one digit for each color, plus an extra black for the lettering cylinder; the copyright (1987), and the slogan, "Use Correct ZIP Code." In addition, video registration markings, used for quality control during the press run, appeared in the selvage of the lower left and lower right panes of each sheet; these were multicolor cross marks.
Printing of the wildlife panes began April 1 on schedule. No further cylinder proofs were made; in recent years, the Bureau and the Postal Service have relied on actual production samples at the start of the press run on which to base their assessments of printing readiness. After the cylinders were placed on the press, adjustments were made to bring the colors into register. Once the web was coming off the press with stamps of finished quality, the press was stopped and three sheets of 200 stamps each were cut from the web. Ralph Payne signed the first and walked with it to the Postal Service for Don McDowell's examination and signature of approval. Payne then telephoned the Bureau with instructions to resume printing.
The signature sheet would be filed at the Bureau. The other two sheets would be kept in the production area, one in the press room itself, for periodic comparison with the stamps coming off the Andreotti.
Preparing for the First-Day Ceremony
The fact that a pane of 50 U. S. wildlife stamps would be first placed on sale at Toronto's CAPEX '87 inevitably recalled the U.S. souvenir sheet -also containing wildlife stamps - that had been issued in 1978 to commemorate the last previous version of the same show, CAPEX '78.
But the shared theme of the two issues was purely coincidental. The 1987 wildlife pane was conceived and developed on its own merits, with no inherent link to CAPEX '87. There was no mention, on the stamps or the pane's marginal markings, of the philatelic exhibition; only the maple leaves, added to two designs as an afterthought, served as a nod of respect to the United States' great neighbor.
The decision to hold first-day ceremonies for the wildlife pane at CAPEX '87 was made by Pete Davidson, director of the Postal Service's Office of Stamps and Philatelic Marketing, and came about because of fortuitous timing
Davidson and Dickey Ruston, manager of the Stamp Information Branch, recalled the successful nature of the Postal Service's involvement in the earlier CAPEX, and were looking for an opportunity to hold a first-day event at CAPEX '87. At about the same time, the Stamps Division advised them that planning for the wildlife pane was moving satisfactorily and that it was safe to predict it would be available in the late spring or early summer of 1987.
"We like to do things at stamp shows," Davidson said. "An international stamp show in North America is a little unusual, and so it just seemed to be a natural for us to take the wildlife pane there."
The Postal Service made its first announcement of the issue when it unveiled its 1987 stamp program May 26, 1986. "A pane of 50 commemorative stamps featuring American wildlife will highlight the program," the Postal Service said. "Each of the colorful stamps will depict a different wildlife subject in its natural habitat, and a variety of birds, mammals, reptiles, and insects will be featured."
On February 20, 1987, the Postal Service released the list of 50 subjects for the wildlife pane. With its announcement, it distributed black-and-white glossy prints of four of the designs - the gray squirrel, bighorn sheep, black bear, and blue jay.
On March 18, the remaining stamp designs were released, in the form of black-and-white glossy prints and color transparencies of the entire pane. Issued with the pictures was a nine-page press release giving some brief background information on each of the species illustrated, along with technical information on the pane and detailed instructions for obtaining mint stamps and first-day cancellations.
Stamp designer Chuck Ripper creating initial pencil sketches.
Later, the Postal Service announced that it would prepare a souvenir card, also for June 13 release, in specific commemoration of CAPEX '87. The card also illustrated a wildlife theme, with reproductions of the U.S. 1923 bison definitive (described as "the first U.S. regular issue to feature American wildlife") and a Canadian 1981 commemorative picturing a Vancouver Island marmot.
As CAPEX '87 approached, the Philatelic Sales Division was busy promoting the wildlife pane and developing a selection of related products and services. The set was prominently featured in color on the front and back covers of the May-June issue of the division's Philatelic Catalog. The front showed a photograph of a snowy egret, with an enlarged reproduction of the egret stamp; the back reproduced the pane of 50.
The division also prepared a protective folder for post offices to give to purchasers of full panes of wildlife stamps. Printed on the folder were appropriate illustrations and text.
Early in June, it was announced that a special "First Day of Sale in the U.S." series of pictorial cancellations would be available for collectors at ten selected national parks. These would be dated Monday, June 15 - the first day the wildlife stamps would be officially available at post offices in the United States. Collectors were given 30 days after June 15 to prepare their own covers (presumably using wildlife stamps, although any 22-cent stamp would suffice) and send them to the divisional postal offices that were designated to handle requests for each of the park postmarks.
The parks were Denali (Alaska), Shenandoah, Acadia, Everglades, Grand Canyon, Isle Royale, Yellowstone, Yosemite, Great Smoky Mountains, and Haleakala (Hawaii). Appropriately, the cancellations were designed for the Postal Service by Chuck Ripper - he did the job in late April and early May and each bore a simple line drawing of a scene typical of that park.
With preparations complete, all that was left to do was await the June 13 opening of CAPEX '87 - and the sale of the wildlife stamps to a waiting public.
George Amick is a journalist and stamp writer from Trenton, New Jersey. He has been collecting the stamps of the U.S. and Canada for more than 40 years.
He is editor of the editorial page of The Times of Trenton. During his career with the newspaper, he has also been Washington correspondent, state capitol correspondent, metropolitan editor, state editor, and Sunday editor. In 1968-69 he was a Nieman journalism Fellow at Harvard University, studying urban problems.
He has contributed scores of articles on a wide range of subjects to philatelic publications. His book "Jenny!" (also published under the title: "The Jenny Invert: Money, Mystery, Mania") tells the complete story of the most famous of stamp errors, the U.S. 24-cent inverted center airmail of 1918.
He also wrote "The American Way of Graft," a study of political corruption, published in 1975 by the Center for Analysis of Public Issues and used as supplementary reading in several college political science courses.
He is married and the father of three children. His wife, Donna, is also a journalist.
This article was written in and appeared in printed form in 1987. © 1987 by Fleetwood, a division of Unicover Corporation. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from Unicover Corporation.
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