US Postal Service Uses Photo of Wrong Statue of Liberty on Stamp

Apr 19, 2011

Michael Zhang

The United States Postal Service admitted last week that the Statue of Liberty photo found on 3 billion newly printed stamps was in fact an image of the half-size replica (shown on left above) found in front of the New York-New York Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas rather than the original in NYC. The original photo was shot by photographer Raimund Linke and was found through Getty Images.

Here’s the stamp that was issued:

While the USPS “regrets the error”, there’s not much they can do about it now — if they had discovered the error early on in the printing process it could have turned into a collectors item, but with three billion copies floating around it’s simply one of the year’s biggest photo fails.

Update: Here’s the original photograph on Getty Images on a page that states that it’s the Las Vegas replica. (thx @JohnMilleker!)

Image credits: Top photographs by Jay Bigalke of Linn’s Stamp News