Guiding Lights

This week Gulf Coast Lighthouses (shown above) are being released.

It is the fifth set of U.S. stamps featuring lighthouses to be issued. The series began in 1990 and has be extremely popular with both collectors and non-collectors ever since.

On the USPS' Beyond The Perf website all 25 stamps featuring the work of Artist Howard Koslow and Art Director Howard Paine are shown. It also points out some interesting details about each set.

For example, Southeastern Lighthouses (2003) was produced as a pane of 20, rather than a booklet, and was the first issuance in the series to use pressure-sensitive adhesive.

According to the website, "New production technologies would also affect the artwork. A source photograph misled Koslow into incorrectly locating the door of one lighthouse. Rather than repainting at the eleventh hour, digital retouching techniques were used to move the door. Yet, while solving one problem, new digital techniques would create another: A positioning error during prepress production resulted in a slight type misalignment on one-quarter of the Cape Lookout stamps."

As seen here, the 2-millimeter shift of the "37 USA" created a variety that was assigned a separate number in the Scott catalogue.

To read the entire article, click here.