Question Regarding BEP Qa Inspections

My idea of why they started to produce forever stamps has always been that they wanted money quickly since the deficit was going overboard at the USPS. By telling (essentially yelling at) the public "Buy them stamps now and when we increase tarifs your stamps are still valid at the higher prices" would be an incentive to the public to buy a lot of stamps at once. This likely lead to increased sales of stamps and reduced the deficit which could be sold as "success" by whoever genius manager thought of that scheme. Of course people with working brain cells knew that this effect would turn against the USPS as the people sitting on their at-once stamp hoards would simply not buy any new stamps (for years?) so the deficit would again skyrocket.

I also think the reason for self-adhesives was the problem of gum. Remember the stamps are sold in arctic Alska to swampland Mississippi. That probably is a temperature range of 0F to 100Fand humidity range of 0% to 100% which leads to sticking and curling of stamps in PO postage drawers and vending machines. The solution in the BEP was to have three different gum mixtures: Winter gum, Summer gum and Spring/Fall gum. The difference is in the % dextrine contents of the gum formulaes, not in different chemical ingredients. It was simply a mess to prepare three different gummed webs for issues that typically sold over a year or even longer for definitive issues. (In the early decades, gum was mixed in the basement of the BEP, on demand).

The switch to the self-adhesive system solved that problem. To the dismay of collectors, it also solved the problem of reusing stamps as the water soluble layer in the self-adhesive was often "forgotten", so that uncanceled stamps could no longer be soaked off the envelope (at least by "normal" customers).

I assumed another reason for the Forever stamps was that the postage rates were starting to change so quickly that post offices were stuck with a pile of stamps at the old rate that became harder to sell and maybe had to be returned to Washington to be destroyed. The Forever stamps could remain at the post offices and in the pipeline "forever" without any logistical problems during the rate change. Similar to the A/B/C non-denominated stamps, there was no need to prime the pipeline with stamps at the new rate. Except that after we got up to F, people forgot what rate applied to what stamp.

drkohler wrote:



I can't see the BEP using seasonal gum paper. The main problem
was high humidity which caused curling and this was alleviated
by applying gum breakers.

"I can't see the BEP using seasonal gum.."

The gum story is in the book (amongst being mentioned in many other places):
History of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, 1862-1962.
It also includes the various formulation tests tried, for example adding phosphoric acid to the dextrine.

Agreed. Doing seasonal gum only makes sense to me if it was strictly meant for the production environment. Because obviously the 'season' can vary greatly across the 3.5 million square miles of the US.

Would they send 'winter' gum to Hawaiian POs?

And how would they know how long stamps would sit in various POs across the country?

Were the stamps marked in some way so the POs could rotate the stock? (For example, 'make sure you use up those summer stamps first'.)

Seasonal gum seems like a logistical nightmare but 'geographic gum' seems more feasible. <shrugs>
Don

I don't buy seasonal or geographic gum simply because you would have to be able to predict demand in each zone when producing and that would be undoable given that stamps were not printed on demand as we normally think of it.

PS: Could Summer/Southern gum be sent to Winter/Northern gum States but not the other way around? How about coastal areas of "dry" States?
PPS: New England presents a real mushkallah given that it ranges from minus 20 degrees with zero humidity to 100 degrees with a dewpoint of 78 where I live in Massachusetts. And those readings can happen with a period of two months at times.

You all have made some good points as to forever stamps and the gum used. I enjoy reading this discussion please continue. This is good stuff. I have already learned some things myself.

Despite the issues raised here about geographical differences and how long stamps were kept after printing before using, there indeed was seasonal gum used, although I don't know for how many years.

DK - they already had an answer to the gum issue in the form of dry gum (aka dull gum), so I don't think the switch to self-adhesives was driven by that.

Another benefit the USPS got out of switching to forevers is thet didn't have to waste money printing and more importantly selling low value stamps to all the people holding stamps from the previous rate.

Keep in mind that the USA, BEP, and USPOD/USPS is not an isolated island but has adopted many postal innovations started (or experimented with) elsewhere. We followed as much as we led.

We need to hear from Joe Brockert as he knows all about what we are merely doing semi-informed speculating on.