ALA Washington Office 1982 First Day Cover

On July 13, 1982 the United States Postal Service (USPS) issued a postage stamp honoring Americas’s Libraries. The first day of issue ceremony for the stamp took place in Philadelphia at the Philadelphia Civic Center in conjunction with the annual meeting of the American Library Association. Participants in the ceremony included ALA President Betty Stone, Keith Doms, Director of the Free Library of Philadelphia, and Jane F. Kennedy, General Manager of the Library Division of the USPS. It is common practice to create special first day covers (envelopes) for new postage stamps that are cancelled with a “First Day of Issue” postmark. These covers usually include a cachet (illustration) and are created by commercial companies, organizations, and individuals. The American Library Association created its own first day cover (see below) which it sold to ALA members and collectors of first day covers.  The Washington Office of ALA also created a first day cover to celebrate the occasion. I’m a collector of first day covers for the 1982 America’s Libraries postage stamp, and I recently had the good fortune to receive as a gift one of the first day cover issued by the ALA Washington Office. Thank you Gail McGovern! The really neat thing about this cover which is shown above is that it is signed by Betty Stone, ALA President, and Eileen Cook, the Director of the ALA Washington Office. The cover includes an insert “An A B C For Dealing With Your Legislators”. The content of the insert was created by Rep. John E. Fogarty of Rhode Island for an ALA Legislative Workshop in 1965.  I wrote a previous post about Eileen Cooke and the other “Extraordinary Women of ALA’s Washington Office”.