The history of philately

How can a bunch of pieces of old paper be so enthralling?

Stamp scans by Bonnie Huang, Harry Gay, and Rhea Thomas

Stamp collecting is widely considered to be an exceptionally dull pastime, a hobby that is boring to enjoy and even more boring to hear about. Especially from that guy who thinks both it and he are super interesting, and that you really want to hear about his hundred different stamps with Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second’s head on them.

To be honest, since about September last year, I am probably that guy. But before you pigeonhole me, I ask for an opportunity to make my case. Stamp collecting is not boring — it is anything but. It’s a personal art gallery filled with compelling and fascinating graphic design, rivalling any museum in Australia (in miniature form). It’s a much-shunned kind of imaginative time travel, where every stamp is a capsule of forgotten history. It’s a jumping off point for discovering the little bits of history that form the tapestry of time. I may not be able to convince you, but I ask you politely to give stamp collecting a chance.

Stamps — those little bits of paper that once upon a time, when letters were all the rage, allowed you to pay for postage — have a rich history. The British ‘Penny Black,’ first issued in 1840, is widely considered the first true stamp. It’s a rather lacklustre design, featuring the profile of a young Queen Victoria on a black background, but represented a revolution in the universalisation and centralisation of postage. Within 20 years, stamps were being issued in 90 countries.

Stamp collecting has existed as a hobby since at least the first proper stamps were invented. In fact, the hobby actually predated the first real stamps. Apparently, John Bourke of Ireland “assembled a book of the existing embossed revenue stamps at the time,” some four decades before the Penny Black was issued. However, the distinguished title of first ‘official’ stamp collector goes to John Edward Grey, British zoologist, and purchaser of four Penny Black stamps on its first day of sale with the intent to collect them. Philately, the accepted term for the hobby, was invented later by Frenchman Georges Herpin — who was thus the first ‘philatelist.’ This odd, slightly gross sounding, term is a combination of the Greek philo, meaning attraction, and ateleia, a word meaning exempt from taxation. And so, philately was born.

Since then, thousands upon thousands of people have engaged with the hobby, with notable names including Franklin D. Roosevelt, who claimed that he “owe[d] [his] life to [his] hobbies,” especially stamp collecting.

Another notable name is my good friend Max, who so kindly donated his old stamp collection to me during the COVID-induced rut of semester two, 2021. At first, I was a little sceptical “isn’t stamp collecting boring?” I thought. But upon realising I had nothing better to do, I decided to give it a go. Within a week, a box of something like 600 stamps had arrived at my Brisbane flat, along with an old stamp book.

I opened the box and I was hooked — over the next week or so I became a philatelist. I sorted the myriad stamps from a myriad of countries into messy little piles and categorised them into their countries and time periods. I was awed by the diversity of places represented: there were stamps in this collection from places like Cuba, South Africa, China, The Maldives — even Azerbaijan. I quickly realised that each stamp was a window into a very different time and place. There was a stamp issued by the French postal service in the Ottoman Empire, dating to a very different, pre-WWI world. There were stamps from now-defunct countries like Yugoslavia. There were Australian stamps with the image of the short-reigning King George VI on them.

Within another week I had ordered a larger stamp book. The hobby is addictive: I have since ordered three lots of mixed international stamps on eBay (they’re remarkably cheap) and spent hours reorganising my collection. It was a great way to spend my COVID isolation period.

But how can a bunch of pieces of old paper be so enthralling?

My first instinct is to identify the joy of categorisation. I was always that child — I spent hours upon hours reorganising my set of dinosaur cards into various orders: first taxonomical, then based on time period. I would sort coloured pencils and pens for fun. But whilst there is a certain mundane joy to be gained from reordering various things, I would like to think it is more than that.

A second factor may be the sense of achievement gained from possessing a collection of something: the slightly narcissistic pride of opening your stamp book and surveying not only the amount of stamps you have from all manner of different countries, but also the great feeling that comes with spending hours hunched over your desk to get them all in the right order. But that too isn’t quite it.

Whilst both these things are appealing parts of the hobby, I don’t believe they are the attributes that make it particularly special or unique. One could collect pretty much anything — playing cards, matchbox cars, balls of fluff — and perhaps get some strange joy from organising and viewing their collection. But stamp collecting in particular possesses a unique kind of beauty.

For a start, your stamp collection will be physically beautiful. Having a stamp collection is like your own micro-scale art gallery. Every stamp has a unique drawing, or painting, or slightly off-putting but nevertheless charming early-2000s piece of graphic design. There are the stamps from Papua New Guinea with vibrant, detailed, and crisp paintings of various masks worn by Indigenous peoples — set to lurid orange and blue backgrounds. There are the wonderfully pastel Iranian stamps commemorating the 1972 International Literacy Day. Your stamp collection could occupy you for hours in this way: noticing and admiring the little details, the hours of artistry poured by people from across the world into these delightful postage stamps. 

But that’s not all. Every stamp is a miniature time travel machine. Any stamp with a postmark on it has been sent, representing a letter from one person to another in an entirely different time and place. These are little pieces of history that are all but forgotten, perhaps fortunately tucked away in the form of old letters in someone’s attic, but more likely entirely lost to time. Why not flick through your collection for a while and use your imagination to fill the lost gaps. Build little stories around these stamps, and transport yourself in space and time — become a voyeur of the intimacy and mania of life through time.

However, every stamp also reveals a broader picture. As government-issued denominations, stamps always represent a particular context. They are clues to the big events of history — the threads of turmoil and tumult that categorise the last two centuries. They are excellent jumping-off points to learn about fascinating events in faraway places.

Through a Nepalese stamp I learnt that Nepal once had a monarchy before being plunged into a civil war between Maoists and Royalists that lasted until 2006. A key turning point in the conflict was a horrific incident where the Nepalese Crown Prince turned a gun on his own family, killing nine others — including his father the King — before taking his own life. The event destroyed Nepalese faith in the monarchy and was instrumental in the path to a fragile peace and democracy.

Some stamps even reveal philately scandals: a unique triangular stamp attributed to the Republik Maluku Selatan led me down a Wikipedia rabbit hole detailing German scam artists’ attempt to fake stamps from a short-lived secessionist state in the Maluku province of Indonesia. The scammers attempted to produce and sell a set of unique stamps to collectors around the world. Whilst most ‘respected’ collections won’t trade these fake stamps, I think it’s yet another fascinating little piece of history.

So flip through your stamp collection and pay attention — look for details of histories that you know nothing about. Use these details — perhaps as simple as the picture of a Yugoslavian monarch, or the unfortunate words “Afrique Equale Française” — to embark on a journey into the corners of history: the bits you might not have stumbled upon in school, or even university. You will be fascinated, amused, and even disgusted by what you find — but I guarantee you one thing: you will certainly not be bored.