Indeed, postage stamps can in fact morph into documents of states and regimes which have long since disappeared. So what is it that gets collectors so excited about these colorful snippets of paper? Is it this special mix of how a country presents itself to the outside world paired with concentrated art in a minimum space that so fascinates them? Or is it the diametrically opposed relationship between a nation’s political messages and their narrative, at times even allegorical depiction? Philosopher Gottfried Gabriel calls this the “rhetorical functionalization of aesthetic qualities”. ![]() Yet there is one dimension to the postage stamp that crucially exceeds its duty of promising safe delivery and seldom tends to feature in the official records of the postal services. In this manual postal technicians described numerous innovations, including paper selection, coating the stamp with gum Arabic, printing processes and, last but not least, the perforation of the sheets to facilitate detaching – likewise a British invention. “Postage stamps are adhesive tokens made of thin paper that tend to take the form of a landscape or portrait-format rectangle,” the German “Handwörterbuch des Postwesens” of 1953 states with deliberate matter-of-factness. “The majority of the German states,” as Friedell states, only opted for these innovations at the end of the 1840s. ![]() In his “Cultural History of the Modern Age” Egon Friedell draws a parallel between the introduction of the Penny post and the British head-start in mechanical engineering, railroad construction and steam navigation. The proposals made by Hill, who was commissioned with the implementation of his own reform, put a stop to these peculiarities. On occasion he was forced to leave empty-handed, for instance, if the key information was simply written in cypher on the cover of the letter. Transport and delivery were a tedious process as the postman had to collect money from every recipient. Prices were based on the distance covered and the number of sheets of paper that went to make up the letter. Not only in England, but also in other countries at the time it was customary for the recipient, not the sender, to pay for the delivery. The introduction of the postage stamp and the fixed penny rate associated with it was expected to radically reform the postal service in Great Britain. In 1837 English master Rowland Hill had published a pamphlet on the reform of the postal service that caused quite a stir. ![]() From then onwards, without exception royal portraits depicting the protagonist in dignified profile in the style of Roman Emperors on coins graced postage stamps in the British Empire and to this day, a miniature silhouette of the present monarch features on every stamp issued by the Royal Mail. In England, heralded a new age of mass communication as on that day the first ever postage stamp was issued, the famous “Penny Black”, followed two days later by the “Twopenny Blue”, both of them featuring a portrait of the then 21-year-old Queen Victoria. Printed in batches on large sheets right from the beginning, it is one of our earliest mass-produced items. Yes, the stamp is celebrating a very special anniversary. This year, the little scrap of paper will have been around for 175 years.
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