A Stamp for Plum

From the society’s earliest days, efforts were made to honor P. G. Wodehouse with a commemorative U.S. postage stamp. TWS’s records show that the very first attempt began in December 1980; it was led by Pauline Blanc with the idea of marking Plum’s 100th birthday in 1981, but this proved to be too late. Nevertheless, the crusade continued, and in the January 1984 issue of Plum Lines, Bill Blood urged members to “pester” the U.S. Postal Service about it. In the early 1990s, Susan Cohen picked up the gauntlet and even went so far as to have Chapter One artist Lou Glanzman design some portraits of Wodehouse for the USPS to choose from. Still no dice, and in 1996 then-president Elliott Milstein started a new campaign to pester the USPS, writing a letter so persuasive that it seems impossible to understand how or why he was turned down.