Every stamp and piece of mail tells a story. In fact, each often tells multiple stories, ranging from concept to art design to production to usage, often with tales of politics, history, technology, biography, genealogy, economics, geography, disaster, and triumph. The lens of philately offers a fresh and engaging story of American history, culture, and identity, and it can also help deepen the understanding of world cultures. The William H. Gross Stamp Gallery, opened at the Smithsonian National Postal Museum in September 2013, has many such stories to tell. Chief philately curator Cheryl R. Ganz guides readers through some of the gallery's nearly 20,000 objects that together illustrate the history of our nation's postal operations and postage stamps.

This book is a collection of short stories designed to be used for reading practice and entertainment for home and classroom readers. It consists of 50 mostly fictional stories in several different interest areas. The areas include adults, boys and girls, animals, strange happenings, directions, lifelike objects, humor, and others. Many of these stories contain an introduction of factual information followed by a fictional story. In selected stories, there is another story following it that is related to it in some way. I have been associated with education most of my life, from being a teacher, a counselor, and a sales representative for a company whose main business was selling to the education market. Then for many years that followed, I have worked as a developer of educational software in reading, writing, and math. My favorite part of developing was always the creation of new stories, and that is why I decided to put this new book together.

Describes and lists current prices for thousands of stamps