02/12/2008 Contact:
Fred Baumann
Also available in .pdf format
The
Liberty Series Wins Grand Award
at COLOPEX
The
Liberty Series, published last August by the
American Philatelic Society, has won the Grand Award for Literature
as well as a Gold Medal at Colopex 2008 February 1-3 in Columbus,
Ohio. The annual exhibition and bourse of the 83-year-old Columbus
Philatelic Club, Inc., this World Series of Philately-accredited
exhibition has included a Literature Competition as part of its
annual celebration of the stamp hobby since 1984.
Co-authored
by Ken Lawrence, C. David Eeles, and Anthony S. Wawrukiewicz,
The Liberty Series is a comprehensive guide to the
long-running series of engraved United States definitives that
began in 1954 and saw variants still in use as recently as
1988.
The
262-page book is richly detailed, covering the stamps, precancels,
errors, freaks, oddities, booklets, panes, tagging varieties,
postal stationery and important period postal history throughout,
with nearly all its 505 images in full color. Included are
practical illustrations of such well-known and important Liberty
series variants as the wet and dry printings and large- and
small-hole coil varieties, as will the stories of the rare
tagged 3-cent Liberty coil variety used by Look magazine
in 1967 and the 2-cent Jefferson sheet stamp printed on experimental
Silkote paper in 1954.
Enhancing
the value of the volume is a chapter on mail processing technology
and its little-known collectible artifacts, a chapter on dummy
(test) stamps, a brilliant chapter on cover collecting and
two indexes for readers to consult as they build their collections.
The
book is supplemented by sidebars throughout the book, on subjects
including rating a cover, tagging, postal card usages, and
the end of the Liberty series. A color-coded six-page table
shows plausible periods of use of the 3-cent stamp and its multiples
to pay important contemporary rates, while a second table displays
selected U.S. postal rates during the Liberty Series era — over
24 different changes and adjustments between February 1954 and
March 2, 1974 — a boon to recent U.S. postal history buffs.
The
Liberty Series is available for $48 to APS members, a 20-percent
discount from the nonmember’s price of $60. To order, send
your remittance and your name and address (and your APS number
for members’ orders) to American Philatelic Society, 100
Match Factory Place, Bellefonte PA 16823-1367. To order this
and other American Philatelic Society publications online, visit
the APS Marketplace.
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