Stamps, Part Deux: Arranging the Page

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STAMP COLLECTIONS ARE SOMETHING AKIN to scrapbooks. How you arrange the stamps on a blank page can be an entirely personal design exercise. Some of the most beautiful arranged collections I have ever seen are arrowheads. Since they are pointed, displays usually end up with some unique, creative arranged designs. With the exception of the top image, these pages showcase unusual cancellation marks of stamps, which I think is a highly artistic collecting focus.

These stamps were part of the 2009 Heritage Auction Galleries Inaugural Signature Stamp Auction. Heritage Auction Galleries is the world’s largest collectibles auctioneer. The auction is online, through Live Auctioneers.

An AM repost from 2/7/09.

Found Postage Stamp Collages

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IT’S ALWAYS FUN TO FIND SOMETHING WORTH taking home at a flea market. Better yet, it’s good to find something quite outside the ordinary where a creative act has taken place. My friend, photographer and raconteur Francois Robert, spotted these stamp constructions a year or so ago at a flea market. Apparently, someone was moved to recycle a collection of used postage stamps—the impetus for many a folk artist throughout history. Whether it be a few hundred bottle caps, popsicle sticks, old sewing spools, soft drink pop tops—whatever— if there are a lot of something, creative people will often find a way to put the objects to use.

Pissing Off the Fuhrer

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I SPOTTED THIS ON WIKIPEDIA. THE IMAGE CAUGHT MY EYE. OPERATION CORNFLAKES was a WWII Office of Strategic Services PSYOP mission in 1944 and 1945 which involved tricking the German Postal Service into inadvertently delivering enemy propoganda to German citizens through the mail.

The operation involved special planes that were instructed to airdrop bags of false, but properly addressed, mail in the vicinity of air struck mail cars of trains. When recovering the mail, the postal service would hopefully confuse the false mail for the real thing and deliver it to the various addresses.

The content of the mail often included copies of Das Neue Deutschland, the Allie’s German language propaganda news sheet. In addition, the postage stamps used were subtly designed to resemble the standard stamp with Adolph Hitler’s face, but a close examination would reveal that his face is made to look like an exposed skull or similarly unflattering imagery. Also the country identifier “Deutsches Reich” (German Empire) read “Futsches Reich” (Collapsed Empire). The actual stamps are extremely rare, and expensive. The rarest of the rare. I found another great article about all of this here.

There are no clear indications on how successful the operation was, but I know this much. I would have liked to have worked in that department!

Most of this copy is directly from Wiki.