First Class

A rare, magnified look at America's best-designed stamps from the mid-20th century Every picture tells a story—even one on a postage stamp. Presented enormously enlarged, the 128 stamps in this book chronicle a stylish era of design: mid-20th-century America. Spanning the late 1950s to the early 1970s, these mini-masterpieces were created when the US post office started to use lavish color on its stamps, and hire the best midcentury talents to design them.

That talent roster includes Japanese American children’s book illustrator Gyo Fujikawa, barrier-busting Black graphic artist Georg Olden, Bauhaus master Herbert Bayer, pop artist Robert Indiana, sultan of psychedelia Peter Max, and others. This book divulges the stories behind their tiny pieces of art.

Photographed at five, ten, and even fifteen times their actual size, each stamp is presented with a morsel of fun info that will broadly appeal to stamp collectors, history and nostalgia buffs, midcentury design fans, and everyone who likes to geek out on magnified views of teeny images.