Customer Reviews

An American Postal Portrait: A Photographic Legacy

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

"An American Postal Portrait" is a visually engrossing cultural history of the postal service. My father, a letter carrier in Kansas, was fascinated. It renewed the pride he feels in his job. It was a positive reminder that despite our techno age's slurs against "snail mail," the image of the letter carrier remains a powerful cultural--human--image. The book is a reminder that "technological advances" are poor substitutes for the power of human interaction. This book would be the perfect gift for anyone you know who proudly labors to ensure that our country's mail will be delivered despite rain, or sleet, or snow....

This is a wonderful book that reflects society and postal history on a parallel through time. Check out the section on the dog that was a mascot and traveled all across the world via airplane and earned his own medals! I learned a lot about our postal system and the photos were great. This was purchased for my husband who collects stamps. He really enjoyed reading about the "other" side of stamps.

Someone has done a beautiful job selecting the two hundred or so photos in this book. From my experience historical photo surveys often fall down because they frequently use far too many technically bad photos that do have someting to say about what they show. The nice thing about these pages is that you'll not find anything that'll make you say: Why was that picture included?"

Though it was published in 2000 I can't see that this dates the book at all. USPS might come across as a bureaucratic Washington monster but there is no getting round the fact that it delivers huge amounts of mail anywhere and daily.

The wonderful photos through the pages reveal the history of the mail service and one of the strengths of the book is the frequent naming of individuals in the photos. Page sixty-seven shows Carrie Hurley, a mailbag machinist who retired in 1923, she had sewn 48 million bag seems over twenty-six years, page 112 shows mail carrier Adolphe Lampe with his horse Daisy and wagon, after January 1955 motorized transport took over mail his deliveries in street of Philadelphia. Page 134 has a lovely photo of Moses Walter outside the Stella, Kentucky post office (ZIP 41469) where he worked for five decades and traveled over 500,000 miles delivering mail to Appalachian residents.

Mixed in with the individuals are historical photos of how the Service has moved with the times by using technology to handle ever larger amounts of mail. A photo from 1922 shows the Gehring Mail Distribution Machine used to sort mail but it wasn't until the fifties that non-manual sorting really took off.

The book is a treat to look at with large photos, obviously most are mono and they all get captions that are worth reading. Two spreads in the back pages feature sixty-seven stamps that use the mail service for the illustrations. I thought this was a lovely book that puts a human face on a service that tends to be taken for granted.

***SEE WHAT THE INSIDE LOOKS LIKE by clicking 'customer images' under the cover.