About This Stamp
The Postal Service issued a 32-cent Lila and DeWitt Wallace definitive stamp on July 16, 1998, in Pleasantville, New York. The stamp is one of the Great Americans series issuances.
Lila and DeWitt Wallace, founders of Reader's Digest magazine, were two of America's foremost philanthropists. During their lifetimes, the Wallaces gave many millions to great charitable causes in the field of education, the arts, and music. In 1972, President Richard Nixon awarded them the Medal of Freedom.
The engraved stamp design is based on a pencil sketch portrait of Lila and DeWitt Wallace by veteran stamp designer Paul Calle. Designed by Howard Paine of Delaplane, Virginia, the stamp was engraved through the intaglio process by Ashton Potter (USA) Ltd. and printed in water-activated panes of 20.
Stamp Art Director
Howard E. Paine
A member of the Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee before being named an art director in 1981, Howard E. Paine supervised the design of more than 400 U.S. postage stamps. After three decades as an art director for the U.S. Postal Service, he retired in 2011.
For more than 30 years Paine was an art director for the National Geographic Society, where he redesigned National Geographic magazine, developed the children’s magazine, National Geographic World, and designed Explorers Hall. A popular lecturer, he has spoken at Yale University and New York University, among others, and presented programs for the National Park Service and the Smithsonian Institution. A judge for numerous art shows and design competitions, Paine also taught magazine design at The George Washington University.
Paine had been a stamp collector since childhood. In 2000, he designed the catalog for Pushing The Envelope: The Art of the Postage Stamp, an exhibit of original stamp art at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
Howard Paine died on September 13, 2014.