One doesn't have to be a chauvinist to recognize that US stamps were (up to about 1950) the best in the world. The British, of course, invented the postage stamp, and their first design, a profile of Victoria, was a huge success. But they never got past that triumph: they continue to this day to use the same motif, shorn of its creative impulse. The French, Germans, and Italians put comparatively little effort into stamps. US stamps, by contrast, had immense vigor and power. They were works of micro-architecture: they expressed the pride and the power of the Republic. My designs are attempts to recapture that tradition.