Lighthouses stand as sentinels of the coastline, reminders of the romance and danger of our seafaring past.
Our coastlines today have fewer than one-third as many functioning lighthouses as a century ago. Yet like a well-designed stamp, a lighthouse is a touchpoint to something deep and meaningful to our culture.
The release of Gulf Coast Lighthouses extends the popular Lighthouses series, featuring the work of Artist Howard Koslow and Art Director Howard Paine. The series also reflects some of the fascinating changes in the stamp design and production process that occurred between 1990 and 2009.
Lighthouses (1990)
The first release, Lighthouses (1990) was not a Postal Service series unto itself. Instead, it was one of several topical booklets celebrating popular Americana, ranging from classic automobiles to steamboats. Released to commemorate the bicentennial of the U.S. Coast Guard and the U S. Lighthouse Service, the five-stamp set captures lighthouses from each major U.S. coastal region.
The 1990 booklet was the only Lighthouses issuance printed by the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing (BEP), which explains its slightly narrower stamp format. The set also features a BEP innovation: intaglio printing using white, opaque ink. The printing approach allowed a rare, collectible error: A few booklets have been found without the intaglio ink, thus missing any denomination.
Great Lakes Lighthouses (1995)
After a five-year hiatus and in response to popular demand, Great Lakes Lighthouses (1995) reunited Koslow with Paine in a collaboration that has now lasted nearly 20 years.
The success of the first release turned Koslow into something of a lighthouse expert. He conducted his own research and made initial recommendations of sites to include in the second release. Koslow even commissioned a photographer to capture the lighthouses from specific perspectives.
Great Lakes Lighthouses was the first lighthouse release to focus on a single region and organize the stamps geographically — one from each of the five Great Lakes. It was also the last of the series to feature traditional, water-activated adhesive.
Southeastern Lighthouses (2003)
Koslow and Paine retained the popular elegance of the series while changes were afoot in the stamp production process. 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. When the series began, fewer than 10 percent of stamps used the new adhesive. By the 2003 release, virtually all of them did.
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.
Pacific Lighthouses (2007)
With the release of Pacific Lighthouses (2007), the Postal Service made the series official: The header for the 20-stamp pane bears the words “Fourth in a Series.” The issuance again proceeded geographically, tracing the arc of lighthouses from Hawaii to Alaska and down the West Coast. As always, historical significance was a factor in site selection. One example was Hawaii’s Diamond Head lighthouse, whose personnel were pressed into service during the Pearl Harbor attack, warning incoming ships by radio.
Reflecting the ongoing changes in the stamp production process, Pacific Lighthouses was the first of the series to offer verso text on the reverse of the pane’s liner, giving a detailed description on the back of each stamp. Early releases rarely made this use of the liner space. Today, nearly all stamps in the collectible program do.
Gulf Coast Lighthouses (2009)
Like all releases in the series, Gulf Coast Lighthouses (2009) reflects history — this time in a poignant way. The region was devastated by Hurricane Katrina's fury in 2005, and Biloxi Lighthouse, site of the dedication ceremony, is currently under repair.
The Postal Service's ongoing commitment to accuracy required special vigilance for these stamps. “We sent photographers down there to see what it looks like today,” Paine says. “We didn't romanticize it the way it was — or romanticize how we want it to look 10 years from now.”
A great stamp is — like a lighthouse — a kind of time capsule. Just as Koslow and Paine have given us these 25 memorable images, can we look forward to more? Inland waterways, perhaps?