The United States Postal Service (USPS) announced that Ayn Rand's likeness will grace a first-class stamp.
     Best known for her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand was also a lifelong stamp enthusiast and collector.
     "Knowing Miss Rand's love of stamps, I think this is an excellent way to acknowledge and honor her influence and popularity," said Michael S. Berliner, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute.
     Stamp subjects are chosen by the Citizens' Stamp Advisory Committee. Members of the committee are appointed by the Postmaster General of the United States. To be considered to appear on a stamp, a person must have been dead for 10 years, have been an U.S. citizen, and have had a notable personal or professional achievement.
     Miss Rand died in 1982, and her novels and non-fiction books continue to sell more than 300,000 copies each year. Her non-fiction writings, which explain her philosophy of Objectivism, have been anthologized in many college textbooks. A 1991 Library of Congress survey found that Atlas Shrugged was second only to the Bible as the most influential book in Americans' lives. A recently completed Random House readers' poll named Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead as the two best books of the 20th century.
     Miss Rand, in a 1971 Minkus Stamp Journal article, wrote: "When one turns to stamps, one enters a special world by a process resembling a response to art: one deals with an isolated and stressed aspect of existence -- and one experiences the sense of a clean, orderly, peaceful, sunlit world . . . it is a world for orderly, rational minds."
     (The Ayn Rand postage stamp was released in April 1999.)