A new postage stamp will be unveiled October first. Lifetime stamp collector Mike Pauly wrote a column about collection stamps for a quarter-century in the Des Moines Register, and he says bats will be featured on the newest 37-cent stamps. He says “animals are big on stamps,” and there’ve already been all kinds of fishes, birds and animals, so a bat’s in keeping with the tradition of a “lot of flora and fauna.” He says it ties in nicely with Halloween at the end of the same month, and salutes an animal that does quite a bit of good for humans, despite the bat’s bad image. It’s true what you’ve heard about no living person being pictured on a postage stamp…at least mostly true.Supposedly no one appears on a stamp who hasn’t been dead ten years, except presidents who get a stamp almost immediately. Pauly says there have been a few exceptions like post-war commemorative stamps, the astronauts on the moon, and a stamp picturing workers at Ground Zero. Pauly’s been a philatelist most of his life.He says he laid it aside for a while when he found girls and baseball were more fun, but returned to stamp-collecting when his kids found his old albums and he’s been hard at it for the last 35 or 40 years. Since he’s been there, Pauly has advice for young people interested in collecting stamps.He says to ask family and friends for mail they get, at home or business, because the beauty of stamp collecting is that you can partake without spending a whole lot of money. The four new “bat” stamps will be sold as part of a page of twenty, in the new 37-cent denomination that’s needed to send a first-class letter.
