Miami Beach Monsters, an off-off-Broadway musical that came and went around 1999, revolved around old movie monsters, long retired to Florida, suddenly rediscovered due to a new issue of commemorative postal stamps. In one scene, Dracula complains he had not consented to the use of his image. Life imitates art: Long before opening night, the Postal Service had honored Frankenstein, the Mummy, and the Wolfman. Since then, Daffy Duck, Bugs Bunny, Sylvester, Tweety Bird, and the Disney characters have joined them.

The United States issues so many stamps with such enthusiasm that you might forget they are merely adhesive receipts for prepaid postage. According to a heavily illustrated poster, “Stamp Program 2005: A Universe of Appeal,” at the 34th Street General Post Office, this country will release more than 100 different stamps during 2005 alone, including issues commemorating sporty cars, holiday cookies, and, yet again, the art of Disney.

The definitions of “commemorative” in the “Random House Dictionary of the English Language” include stamps “issued to commemorate a historical event, to honor the memory of a personage, etc.” The word itself is derived from the Latin commemorare: to recall or put on record. Thus, such stamps are memorials, making honorable mention of something worth remembering.

Why does the United States issue so many stamps? Money. Many collectors will gladly purchase a copy of every kind of postal paper run through a government press. These stamps will never be used to carry mail. Their sale represents pure profit.

By contrast, from 1840, when Britain first issued postage stamps, until the 1890s, most people considered them merely useful objects. In 1869, when the U.S. Post Office released pictorials bearing ships, eagles, locomotives, and reproductions of John Vanderlyn’s “Landing of Columbus” and John Trumbull’s “Signing of the Declaration of Independence,” the New York Herald grumbled that the government might change “stamps as often as every six months, not giving the people a chance to get used to one variety before it was withdrawn and the people’s eyes startled by another.”

This began changing in 1894, when the co-Regents of the Most Serene Republic of San Marino (a tiny independent country on the Italian peninsula), pressured by rising government expenses, averse to increasing taxes or cutting costs, envisioned opening the pocketbooks of the world’s stamp collectors to swell the nation’s coffers. They issued a set of commemoratives bearing their portraits with different views of the National Palace. Within months, stamp sales alone had retired the national debt and financed a sewage system.

San Marino, all 38 square miles of it, has since issued more stamps than nations a thousand times its size: Thousands of handsome commemoratives show national and international heroes, ships, locomotives, military uniforms, dinosaurs, aircraft, castles, temples, dogs, fictional detectives, and so forth. Forty years ago, the little country was issuing 56 different stamps a year. Today, it releases new issues several times a month, and demand seems insatiable.

The U.S. Postal Service, as it is called now, officially acknowledged stamp collecting by establishing a philatelic agency in 1921 (“philately,” the English term for stamp collecting, comes from the Greek philos, fond of, and ateleia, exemption from tax, and perhaps means that a sender’s prepayment of postage exempts a receiver from paying it). The 1932 election of a philatelist president has been followed by a progressive increase in the number of American commemorative stamps.

The ongoing “Black Heritage” series hit a high note a few years ago with a splendid stamp of an alert, active, and thoughtful Malcolm X. Greatness is a remarkable thing: Thus, we can honor without irony a man once known as “Detroit Red” and “the Harlem Asp,” a former hustler, pimp, dope addict, numbers pusher, and thief, because he transformed himself into a dynamic, vitriolic preacher and teacher, and then a practical, heroic visionary. Malcolm X calls to mind Ignatius Loyola, who aspired to a life of unending sensation: wenching, drinking, and fighting, until, realizing he could not find fulfillment in the flesh, he turned at last to God. The Malcolm X stamp was among the few recent commemoratives to sell out long before its planned withdrawal from sale.

But increasing the number of issues can result in infelicitous subject matter. Last year’s “Black Heritage” honoree, athlete, actor, and singer Paul Robeson, 1952 Stalin Peace Prize laureate, died as he had lived, a stalwart champion of communism. Why a democracy would honor a man who supported Stalin’s show trials and purges and hail the Soviet Union as “the land I love above all” is something of a mystery. But then, some years ago, a stamp honoring the American musical theater of our time celebrated “Cats,” which featured the verse of T.S. Eliot, a devout anti-Semite who renounced his American citizenship to become a British subject.

Apparently, such men are worthy of our nation’s honored remembrance.

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