FOREVER

                                        The Smithsonian Postal Museum    Washington, DC
                                      
Remember the days when we used postage to mail a submission and an SASE? Those colorful bits of paper that would stick to the envelope? Don't use them much anymore in our digital generation--we can quickly email our manuscripts, short stories and non-fiction pieces, save money and time and sometimes get an answer back immediately.

But the stamps were and are beautiful and we could learn about our country's past, the vast world we live in and about the scientists, astronauts, presidents, stars and heros. Forever stamps entered the postal world in 2007 and their rate (45 cents today) will remain. To writers the term Forever is apt--a stamp issued a year ago honors Mark Twain and perhaps one of the reasons writers write is to have a part of us live forever.

In Roughing It, published in 1872, the book sold 75,000 copies within a year of publication. Mark Twain describes sitting on the back seat of a coach; the rest of the coach filled with three days of delayed mail. “Almost touching our knees, a perpendicular wall of mail matter rose up to the roof.  There was a great pile of it strapped on top of the stage and both the fore and hind boots were full.  We had twenty-seven hundred pounds of it aboard.” 

There are 27 stamps in the Literary Arts commemorative series included are Richard Wright, Julia de Burgos and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.

Bests,

Elise

Scene Stealer, my cozy e-book mystery is available at Amazon, Carina Press, Barnes and Noble and wherver e-boks are sold. an audio version has been produced by audible.com