![\"Christmas](\"http:\/\/blogs.brown.edu\/libnews\/files\/2014\/11\/Christmas-2014-Seals-1024x717.jpg\")
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The Brown University Library is celebrating the holiday season with an exhibit of Christmas Seals, installed in three cases in the Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection Gallery at the John Hay Library. The exhibit will be on display through December 18,\u00a02014.<\/p>\n
The seals shown above are the Great Britain Smiler Sheets, which were started in the year 2000 in conjunction with the International London stamp Show. The idea behind them was to try to inspire people to abandon faxes and email and return to the use of personal postal social mail instead. Hopefully, looking at them will make you smile.<\/p>\n
The first issue of the U.S. Christmas Seal, designed by Emily Bissell (1861-1948), a Red Cross volunteer, was intended to save a small tuberculosis sanatorium on the Brandywine River near Wilmington, DE. Her cousin, Dr. Joseph Wales, was one of the staff physicians at the \u201cBrandywine Shack,\u201d an open-air tuberculosis sanatorium, and he asked for her help. The goal was to raise $300 through the sale of a special Christmas stamp that could be purchased for a penny at the local post office in Wilmington and attached to regular mail. Her inspiration for the fundraiser came from an article by journalist and social worker Jacob Riis, who wrote about the successful sale of Christmas Seals in Denmark in 1904.<\/p>\n
Bissell was a member of the Delaware Chapter of the American Red Cross and received permission from the national organization to use the Red Cross emblem in her design, to which she added a wreath of holly and a \u201cMerry Christmas\u201d greeting. To finance the printing of the 1907 Christmas Seal, she borrowed $40 from a friend and arranged for credit from the Theodore Leonhardt and Son printing company of Philadelphia to print 50,000 stamps. The Christmas Seals were placed in small envelopes imprinted:<\/p>\n
25 Christmas Stamps one penny apiece issued
\nby the Delaware Red Cross to stamp out the
\nWhite Plague.
\nPut this stamp with message bright
\non every Christmas letter;
\nhelp the tuberculosis fight,
\nand make the New Year better.
\nThese stamps do not carry
\nany kind of mail
\nbut any kind of mail will
\ncarry them.<\/p>\n
On December 7, 1907, the first Christmas Seals were offered for sale at a table in the Wilmington Post Office and Emily Bissell herself purchased the first seal sold. However, overall sales were slow until the editor of the Philadelphia newspaper, the North American<\/em>, became convinced of the importance of the fundraising campaign. He authorized columnist Leigh Mitchell Hodges to begin a series of daily articles under the heading, \u201cStamp Out Tuberculosis.\u201d The rest of the 50,000 seals quickly sold and a new printing of 250,000 was ordered. Because it was late in the season, the second printing added the words, \u201cHappy New Year.\u201d By the end of the holidays, all 300,000 seals had been sold, raising $3,000 \u2013 ten times Emily Bissell\u2019s original modest goal.<\/p>\n The Christmas Seals are part of the George S. Champlin Memorial Stamp Collection, which is the centerpiece of the John Hay Library’s extensive collections of stamps.\u00a0Click here for more information about Special Collections at Brown, including the stamp collections.<\/a><\/p>\n Dates<\/strong>: November 19, 2014 – December 18, 2014 The Brown University Library is celebrating the holiday season with an exhibit of Christmas Seals, installed in three cases in the Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection Gallery at the John Hay Library. The exhibit will be on display through December 18,\u00a02014. The seals shown above are the Great Britain Smiler Sheets, which were … Exhibit | Christmas Seals<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6994","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.brown.edu\/create\/libnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6994","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.brown.edu\/create\/libnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.brown.edu\/create\/libnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.brown.edu\/create\/libnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.brown.edu\/create\/libnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6994"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/library.brown.edu\/create\/libnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6994\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.brown.edu\/create\/libnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.brown.edu\/create\/libnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.brown.edu\/create\/libnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nLocation<\/strong>: Anne S. K. Brown Gallery, John Hay Library, 20 Prospect Street, Providence<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"