Since the first self adhesive stamp (the Penny Black, made in 1840 featuring the bust of Queen Victoria) stamp designs have been one of the most highly visible designs in society, one that is particularly important since it represents the nation it comes from.
Today we are featuring some stamps from around the world that you will probably never come across, and if you did you would be quite happy because of their value, along with info about the history of stamp design.
The most common types of stamp designs are Portrait bust, Emblem, Numeric, or Pictorial.
Color & Stamps
Although multi-color printing was always possible, and may be seen on the earliest stamps of Switzerland, the process was slow and expensive, and most stamps were in one or two colors until the 1960s.
World’s Most Valuable Stamps
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Hawaiian Missionaries, 1851
In 1851 Hawaii issued its first stamps. These stamps are now referred to as the “Hawaiian Missionaries” because they were frequently used by American missionaries on the islands to send letters back to the continental United States. The new stamps were printed in Honolulu in three denominations (2 cent, 5 cent, and 13 cent). Because the first “Hawaiian Missionaries” were crudely engraved and printed on thin and poor quality paper, very few of these stamps have survived and they are extreme rarities.
The lowest denomination, the 1851 two cent, is the rarest of the set, with only about 16 copies known to exist today. A 2 cent Missionary is valued at about $760,000 in unused condition and about $225,000 used.
Patterns
Usage of patterns has varied considerably; for 60 years, from 1840 to 1900, all British stamps used exactly the same profile bust of Victoria, enclosed in a dizzying variety of frames, while Spain periodically updated the image of Alfonso XIII as he grew from child to adult. Norway has issued stamps with the same posthorn motif for over a century, changing only the details from time to time as printing technology improves, while the US has placed the flag of the United States into a wide variety of settings since first using it on a stamp in the 1950s.
Most valuable U.S. Stamps
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Monopoly On Design
Since postage stamps are a gov’t regulated monopoly we dont get to see a very free and wide selction of stamp designs and such…though now you can get you own stamps designed….
In some cases, overt political pressure has resulted in a backlash; a famous example is that of the US in the late 1940s, when the US Congress had direct authority over stamp design, and a large number of issues were put out merely to please a representative’s constituency or industry lobbyists. The resulting uproar resulted in the formation of an independent Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee that reviews and chooses from hundreds of proposals received each year. Occasionally the public is polled for its choice of design, as with the US’ Elvis stamp of 1993, or some issues of the Celebrate the Century series.
Occasionally designs use text as their primary design element; for instance, a series of US stamps from the 1970s featured quotations from the United States Declaration of Independence. In general however, text has come to be used more sparingly in recent years.
More Color Inspiration From Stamps
Stamps Errors
On the other side, design errors regularly get through the multiple stages of review and checking. Errors have ranged from minute points of rendition (such as the subtly-reversed ears on an Austrian stamp of the 1930s), to misrepresentations of disputed territory in maps, to mistaken text (“Sir Codrington” on 1920s Greece), to the truly spectacular, such as the US “Legends of the West” sheet using the picture of the wrong person. See stamp design error for further detail.
Another category of failure includes designs that are simply rejected by the stamp-buying public. The 1970s-era anti-alcoholism stamp of the US is a well-known example; it consists merely of the slogan “Alcoholism: You Can Beat It!”, which must have looked good during the design process, but affixed to the corner of an envelope it suggests that the recipient is an alcoholic in need of public encouragement, and few people ever used this stamp on their mail.
Sources: stamp design, rarest postage stamps.
