# 2440/3275 - 1990s Love Collection, 21 stamps

Are You Missing These 1989s Love Stamps?

The Love Series has been an annual staple in the US stamp program for decades.  The first Love stamp was issued in 1972, and it officially became an annual series in 1987.

This is your chance to own all 21 Love stamps issued in the 1990s. These whimsical stamps feature hearts, birds, flowers, angels and more issued in sheet and/or booklet forms.  These stamps also represent some interesting postal history.  There’s the first ever self-adhesive Love stamp (#2813), the first stamps in the series to not include the word “Love” (#3123-24), several non-denominated rate change stamps, and the first cut-to-shape stamps (#3274-75). 

The collection also includes the controversial 1995-96 Cherub stamps.  These stamps depicted child angels taken from Raphael’s massive masterpiece, the 9-foot x 6 ½-foot Sistine Madonna.  However, C. Douglas Lewis, a curator at the National Gallery of Art and vice chairman of the Citizen’s Stamp Advisory Committee, warned that child angels, also known as putti, were associated with death, not love.  The USPS believed that removing the figures from the painting would let them stand on their own, and were referred to as “cupids” in press materials. 

The stamps were issued as planned, but media coverage helped stir the controversy.  One mother reportedly called to complain that she had used the Love stamps on her daughter’s wedding invitations and that the “death angel stamps” had jinxed the event.  The debate continued amongst the public. Some agreed that picturing the cherubs on their own put them in a new context, while others still questioned their use on Love stamps.  Despite the controversy, millions of the stamps were sold and the designs remained in use until 1997.

What neat history these stamps capture!  Send for yours now.

Includes US #2440-41, 2535-37, 2618, 2813-14, 2814C, 2815, 2948-49, 2957-60, 3030, 3123-24, and 3274-75