Ken Lawrence's well-traveled exhibit, The Sun Never Sets on Mickey Mouse: Walt Disney's Worldwide Empire, offers a little for everyone in the stamp collecting community to enjoy.

Thousands of children have lingered by pages that include unused Disney stamps and postal stationery from tropical Caribbean islands, remote Himalayan villages, central Asian steppes, Arabian sheikhdoms, post-colonial Africa, Western and Eastern Europe, the Indian Ocean, and Japan.

Used examples on commercial mail are included from most of these places also. Sophisticated philatelic skeptics who doubted that these stamps had a postal purpose have been impressed by these covers.

A section on the U.S. 6-cent Walt Disney commemorative stamp of 1968 includes seldom-seen errors and varieties, and a selection of unusual first-day covers.

Classicists have commented favorably on the 19th century covers of Isigny-sur-Mer, France, Walt Disney's ancestral home. An 1816 folded letter with a straightline ISIGNY town postmark is signed Bazire d'isigny (the original form of the family name, anglicized to Disney after the Norman conquest of Britain).

The collector's passion for finding needles in haystacks is satisfied by a cover canceled at Chicago on December 5, 1901, the place and date of Walt Disney's birth. A rare cancellation of Disney, Nebraska, is a similarly challenging item for U.S. postal history specialists.

Highlights of Disney's life and work, and the growth of his creations into a dominant aspect of worldwide popular culture, are treated thematically, illustrated by every type of philatelic material -- essays, proofs, stamps, souvenir sheets, postal cards, franked envelopes, pictorial and slogan cancellations, covers, meter imprints, advertising cachets and corner cards, booklets, cinderella items, telephone cards, philatelic-numismatic combinations, and so forth.

One cover features an original full-color 1930s drawing of Mickey Mouse complete with Walt Disney signature logotype (and a genuine autograph for comparison) by Hank Porter, who created the Mickey Mouse comic strip.

A second genuine Walt Disney autograph is included, on a letter with metered envelope sent shortly before the great entertainer's death. The exhibit contains the only recorded example of Elias (Walt's father) Disney's writing, on a rare original Mickey Mouse fan card mailed to a friend of the family in 1935.

1930s fancy cancels of Mickey, Texas, and Cat Creek, Montana [Felix the Cat with Mickey], and Bacon's Castle, Virginia [Three Little Pigs and Wolf], are included. Stamps, meter imprints, and other materials relate the production of each classic Disney animated feature film.

Of the 1,200-plus U.S. and allied combat insignia produced by Disney artists during and after World War II, a representative number are shown as patriotic cachets, cancels, postcard subjects, corner cards and letterheads.

Colorful postal and philatelic documentation of the Mickey Mouse Club, Disneyland, Walt Disney World, Tokyo Disneyland, and Euro Disneyland carry through the story -- the pervasive spread and growth of the cultural empire in Walt's later years and after his death, right into the 1990s.

The exhibit closes with a challenge to the attempt by the International Philatelic Federation (FIP) to ban Walt Disney stamps. The exhibitor asks, Is it OK to collect Disney philately? Two Oklahoma cancels answer: Walters, OK, and Disney, OK.