A quiet philatelist, George H. Kaestlin joined the original Rossika Society in 1935 along with the better known Theo B. Lavroff and K. Szymanowski. Whereas Lavroff contributed significantly to Russian philately as an author and researcher and Szymanowski was an avid collector, Kaestlin collected privately. Born in Moscow, circa 1893, Kaestlin arrived in England in 1939. After World War II, When the original Rossika dissolved, he did not join the newly reconstituted Rossica Society of the United States. He never wrote for any philatelic magazine, never joined the London-based British Society of Russian Philately, and never showed his material at any exhibition. Thus he managed to elude notice in the literature of the times and receded into obscurity. Kaestlin’s exceedingly remarkable contribution, however, is found in the quality and scope of his collection and in the preservation of the treasures he acquired (many from the legendary Fabergé collection). Kaestlin’s attention to detail and fastidious collecting habits are evident in the layout and handwriting in his albums. His collection, donated to the Smithsonian Institution in 1984 by his niece Vera Madeleine Kaestlin-Bock, includes more than 1,250 album pages on which he organized more than 14,000 Imperial Russian and zemstvo stamps. The quality of the stamps is outstanding. With the publication of this book, Kaestlin can finally take his place among the greats of Russian philately. The G.H. Kaestlin Collection of Imperial Russian and Zemstvo Stamps is one of the greatest museum collections outside of Russia.

A masterful history of a long underappreciated institution, How the Post Office Created America examines the surprising role of the postal service in our nation’s political, social, economic, and physical development. The founders established the post office before they had even signed the Declaration of Independence, and for a very long time, it was the U.S. government’s largest and most important endeavor—indeed, it was the government for most citizens. This was no conventional mail network but the central nervous system of the new body politic, designed to bind thirteen quarrelsome colonies into the United States by delivering news about public affairs to every citizen—a radical idea that appalled Europe’s great powers. America’s uniquely democratic post powerfully shaped its lively, argumentative culture of uncensored ideas and opinions and made it the world’s information and communications superpower with astonishing speed. Winifred Gallagher presents the history of the post office as America’s own story, told from a fresh perspective over more than two centuries. The mandate to deliver the mail—then “the media”—imposed the federal footprint on vast, often contested parts of the continent and transformed a wilderness into a social landscape of post roads and villages centered on post offices. The post was the catalyst of the nation’s transportation grid, from the stagecoach lines to the airlines, and the lifeline of the great migration from the Atlantic to the Pacific. It enabled America to shift from an agrarian to an industrial economy and to develop the publishing industry, the consumer culture, and the political party system. Still one of the country’s two major civilian employers, the post was the first to hire women, African Americans, and other minorities for positions in public life. Starved by two world wars and the Great Depression, confronted with the country’s increasingly anti-institutional mind-set, and struggling with its doubled mail volume, the post stumbled badly in the turbulent 1960s. Distracted by the ensuing modernization of its traditional services, however, it failed to transition from paper mail to email, which prescient observers saw as its logical next step. Now the post office is at a crossroads. Before deciding its future, Americans should understand what this grand yet overlooked institution has accomplished since 1775 and consider what it should and could contribute in the twenty-first century. Gallagher argues that now, more than ever before, the imperiled post office deserves this effort, because just as the founders anticipated, it created forward-looking, communication-oriented, idea-driven America.

More than three thousand different images appeared on United States postage stamps from the middle of the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth. Limited at first to the depiction of a small cast of characters and patriotic images, postal iconography gradually expanded as the Postal Service sought to depict the country’s history in all its diversity. This vast breadth has helped make stamp collecting a widespread hobby and made stamps into consumer goods in their own right. Examining the canon of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American stamps, Laura Goldblatt and Richard Handler show how postal iconography and material culture offer a window into the contested meanings and responsibilities of U.S. citizenship. They argue that postage stamps, which are both devices to pay for a government service and purchasable items themselves, embody a crucial tension: is democracy defined by political agency or the freedom to buy? The changing images and uses of stamps reveal how governmental authorities have attempted to navigate between public service and businesslike efficiency, belonging and exclusion, citizenship and consumerism. Stamps are vehicles for state messaging, and what they depict is tied up with broader questions of what it means to be American. Goldblatt and Handler combine historical, sociological, and iconographic analysis of a vast quantity of stamps with anthropological exploration of how postal customers and stamp collectors behave. At the crossroads of several disciplines, this book casts the symbolic and material meanings of stamps in a wholly new light.