Daily printout: July 18

The Postal Service will release Low Denomination Flowers, five stamps featuring floral designs, on Thursday, July 18.

The stamps will be:

• One-cent Fringed Tulip, featuring one purple fringed tulip;

• Two-cent Daffodils, featuring two yellow daffodil blossoms;

• Three-cent Peonies, featuring three red peonies;

• Five-cent Red Tulips, featuring five red tulip blossoms;

• 10-cent Poppies and Coneflowers, featuring an array of 10 blossoms — six white poppies and four purple coneflowers — with a touch of greenery.

“These stamps will add elegance and warmth to any piece of mail and make each message as special as the flowers they feature,” said Lisa Bobb-Semple, the USPS stamp services director. “Uniquely, each stamp features the same number of flowers as its cent value — like five flowers on a five-cent stamp — bringing a clever touch to the design.”

Ethel Kessler, an art director for the Postal Service, designed the stamps using images by Harold Davis.

After photographing each arrangement backlit on a lightbox, Davis combined multiple photographic exposures of the flowers, resulting in a luminous, transparent look. He also scanned a sheet of aged paper and added it in post-production to achieve the desired cream-colored background.

All flowers photographed by Davis were grown in his backyard in Berkeley, CA.

Each Low Denomination Flowers stamp will be available in panes of 20 and coils of 10,000 at Post Offices and usps.com.

Stephen Kochersperger has been named USPS historian, a role he assumed on an acting basis in December.

He succeeds Jennifer Lynch, who retired last year.

Kochersperger began his USPS career more than 40 years ago, first as a clerk in Milesburg, PA, and then as postmaster of Julian, PA, where he served for 25 years.

In 2011, he became a writer/editor for the former Capital Metro Area. The next year, he joined the historian’s office at USPS headquarters in Washington, DC.

Kochersperger spearheaded two recent oral history projects: arranging interviews of employees with 50 or more years of service for the 50th anniversary of the Postal Service’s as creation an independent federal agency in 1971 and interviewing postal executives on how USPS handled delivery during the COVID-19 pandemic.

His master’s thesis was on the postal system’s role in American independence.

Kochersperger is a distant cousin of John Wanamaker, the 35th postmaster general, and is related to Charles Kochersperger, the defendant in an 1860 court case that led to the development of the Private Express Statutes, which guarantee the Postal Service’s exclusive right to carry letters for compensation.

“Postal history is in my blood, quite literally,” he said.