 In 1973 Bhutan issued a stamp that looked like a record. Put it on a record player and it would actually play the Bhutanese national anthem!
The United Kingdom is the only country that doesn't have its name on its stamps. (Usually they have the monarch's head.)
The Pacific island of Tonga once issued a stamp shaped like a banana.
The smallest-ever stamp - 9.5 x 8mm - was issued in 1863 by the Columbian state of Bolivar.
Australia has issued several stamps which look just like gems. Special technology was used to create the look of real opals on stamps issued in 1995 and a real diamond in 1996.
The first stamp to be issued, in England on 6 May 1840, was the Penny Black. It's called the Penny Black because it cost a penny, and it was black. The face on the stamp is Queen Victoria, who was Queen at that time. Just because a stamp is old doesn't necessarily make it valuable. The Penny Black is not rare - 68 million of them were printed - but if you had one in excellent condition it could be worth ?1000.
The British colony of Mauritius issued their first two stamps engraved "Post Office" instead of "Post Paid." Only 500 each of a one-penny and two-penny value were printed; 26 still exist. Most of the one-penny stamps were used by the governor's wife on invitations to a fancy-dress ball.
Before stamps were invented, the person who received the letter was charged by the number of pages, and also by the distance the letter had travelled. An Englishman called Rowland Hill came up with the idea of pre-paying for postage with 'postage stamps'. Today stamps just seem like common sense, but the Postmaster General at the time complained, 'Of all the wild schemes I have ever heard of, this is the most extraordinary'! However, Hill's idea was adopted and other countries soon started to issue stamps.
Stamps started out as purely practical objects and it is not generally known that Australia was a pioneer in their development. In November, 1838, the Colonial Postmaster-General in Sydney introduced a system of pre-payment for letters which used a form of postage stamp. This was probably a world first. For, although an Englishman, Roland Hill, thought up the idea of the postage stamp, pre-paid postage in New South Wales pre-dated the famous British 'Penny Blacks' (the first adhesive stamps) by about two years. |
Cats were used for a mail service in Liege, Belgium, in 1879. In all, 37 cats were employed to carry bundles of letters to villages within a 30km radius of the city centre. The experiment was short-lived as the cats proved to be thoroughly undisciplined.
New South Wales issued the first stamps from the Australian continent on 1 January 1850 (although embossed letter sheets had been used by the colony since 1838).
The Hawaii "Missionary" stamps (1851) issued by the native government and used mostly by American missionaries serving in Hawaii, an unused set of eight is valued at about $100,000. In the 1890s, a French collector murdered his best friend when he would not sell him his single copy of the 2 cent missionary - the rarest of the set, with only 15 known to exist..
The first Commonwealth Country to issue a stamp specifically for postage on Christmas greetings cards was Australia in 1957. The first stamps issued specifically for postage on Christmas greeting cards appeared in Austria in December 1937.
 One sheet of the first U.S. airmail stamp was printed with the Curtiss "Jenny" biplane on it flying upside down. A collector purchased the sheet, containing 100 stamps, at a Washington, D.C., post office for $24 in 1918. One such stamp sold in October 2007 for ?415,000!!
New Brunswick "Connell's Folly" (1859) - where Postmaster General Charles Connell used his own portrait on the 5 cent stamp, the value most commonly used in the colony. The public was convinced that he was promoting his own political ambition to become an absolute monarch or dictator. He was forced to resign from office and retire from public life.
The first Australian miniature sheet was issued on 29 October 1928. It featured four 3d stamps with a Kookaburra on a branch of a gum tree. The miniature sheet commemorated the Fourth Australian Philatelic Exhibition held in Melbourne.
The first airmail stationery, consisting of postcards and letter sheets, was produced in Paris for carriage by balloon in 1870.
In 1849 the French Government introduced a law making it an offence to wash or otherwise clean used French postage stamps. This was to combat the practice of using the same stamps over and over again. In one six-year period almost 15,000 persons (including genuine stamp collectors) were charged under this law.
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The world's rarest stamp, (and used to be the most valuable) is the 1c British Guiana of 1856. It was acquired in 1873 by an English schoolboy who later sold it for 6/- to a fellow collector. The stamp is now valued at more than $1 million, but the Treskilling Yellow, a Swedish stamp sold for $2.5 million in 1996.
The numbering of houses for postal purposes began in Paris in 1463-4; the Pont Notre Dame district being the first so numbered.
Germany was the first country to adopt postcodes, introducing a two-digit system in 1942.
The first person other than a head of state (living or dead) to appear on a stamp was Benjamin Franklin whose portrait featured on the 10c stamp issued by the United State in July 1847.
The first person other than royalty to appear on a British stamp was William Shakespeare in 1964.
Potato starch, wheat starch and acacia gum were the ingredients of the gum used on the back of the Penny Black. The Post Office called it cement and early stamps bore instructions 'In Wetting the Back be careful not to remove the Cement'. This created a panic that the gum was injurious to health and led to a Select Committee on Postage Label Stamps being convened in 1852 to enquire into its composition.
The first self-adhesive stamps were issued by Sierra Leone on 10 February 1964.
The earliest adhesive stamps were issued imperforate and had to be torn apart or cut with scissors, although the printers, Perkins Bacon, actually had a small perforating machine in 1840 to perforate cheque book counterfoils. They regarded the perforation of sheets of stamps as impracticable owing to the closeness of the stamps and unevenness of the layout caused by paper shrinkage after printing.
The earliest postal markings date back to about 3000 B.C. They were used by Egyptian court officials and read: 'In the name of the living king, speed!'
The first stamp collector was John Bourke, Receiver-General of Stamp Duties in Ireland. He formed a collection of fiscal stamps in an album in 1774.
The world's largest stamp is the China Special Delivery issue (1913-1914)it was printed in strips with five different designs. The entire stamp measures 247mm by 65mm.
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