Monday Morning Brief | Living people on recent stamps

Linn’s senior editor Denise McCarty reports on living people that have appeared on foreign stamps issued in January, including Game of Throne actors on stamps from Great Britain.

Full Video Transcript:

Good morning and welcome to the Monday Morning Brief for January 29, 2018.

For more than a century, the living people pictured on stamps were mostly limited to royalty and heads of state. In the last couple of decades, some postal administrations began relaxing the rule of no living people on stamps or abandoning it altogether.

In fact, there were three examples of this in late January.

On the 23rd, Great Britain’s Royal Mail issued a set of 15 stamps, along with a souvenir sheet and booklets, featuring characters and scenes from the popular HBO series Game of Thrones.

On the release date, some of the actors pictured on the stamps even posed with enlarged images of them.

The next day, the 24th, Canada Post unveiled and issued a set of five stamps celebrating Canadian women in winter sports. All but one of the six athletes honored on these stamps are living, and they participated in the unveiling ceremony.

In 1997, Australia Post introduced a stamp series that specifically honors living people. The honorees are revealed and depicted on stamps issued each year in January.

This year, on the 18th, the series continued with five stamps honoring living legends of Australian television.

In announcing the issue, Australia Post said: “Now in its 22nd year, the Australia Post Legends Award celebrates the lives of living Australians who have made a unique contribution, inspired the community and influenced the way Australians think about themselves and the community.”

For Linn’s Stamp News and the Scott catalogs, I’m Denise McCarty. Keep up on the latest stamp news by following Linn’s on Facebook and Twitter.