I was a child philatelist, like many of my generation. But stamp-collecting has fallen on hard times now – it’s so long out of fashion it makes train-spotting look cool. And the postal service seems to be in decline too, at least in the UK. So it was in a spirit of nostalgia that I set off for Islington one early autumn day, to visit Stampex, Europe’s biggest philatelic exhibition. It was the day of the postmen’s strike. No letters came. Their absence was palpable, from the front door to the breakfast table. No new mail-order catalogues, no charity appeals, no PR hand-outs, no subscription reminders, no news, no billets doux, no invoices, no cheques, no postal orders (do they still exist?). All foregone – the pleasure of sorting welcome from unwelcome mail: the former opened eagerly, savoured and devoured, the latter consigned to the Gehenna of the rubbish bin.

Are we living in the last days of mail delivery? A day without a letter is a day that starts awry, bereft of the pleasure of anticipation, the inspection of the item of mail for tell-tale marks of its origin – for the writer’s hand in the lines of the address, for the feel and smell of the envelope, for the cancellation mark, the child-like thrill of novel stamps from other countries – windows to another world, bright with birds and animals. (Or if not birds and animals, then cultural icons, historical monuments, national heroes or technological marvels.)

‘The stamp’, writes David Scott, in a recent book on semiotics and philately, ‘is an exceptionally complex sign’. Indeed. Postage stamps contain about as much human-readable information as it’s possible to get on a square inch of paper. A stamp is multifunctional: it is simultaneously a receipt, an undertaking to deliver the object it is attached to, and a miniature billboard, often amplifying the national myth of whatever member-country of the Universal Postal Union issues it. At the Stampex exhibition there were millions of such tiny pieces of paper on display, a century and a half of stamps. And thousands of punters pining for them. These punters were, to a man, men. And most of them white men, about fifty years of age. The stamps, many of them, were older.

Ah those stamps! How they bring back the multifarious antique pleasures of philately: the folding of hinges, the stickiness of gum arabic on the tongue, the touch of plastic tweezers, the thrill of the watermark detector, the excitement of identifying the plate number, say, of a penny black (the world’s first adhesive postage stamp), and looking up its value in the Stanley Gibbons catalogue. And the sense of amazement at triangular and octagonal and circular stamps from Tonga or Bhutan or some other distant place. And the stamps of outrageous size, like the Cuban airmail ‘Genocidio en Vietnam’, a monster over three inches tall that featured B52s with US air force markings raining bombs on Vietnamese villages. (It’s a stamp that, if attached to a letter addressed to someone in the United States, according to the Universal Postal Convention, the US postal service would be obliged to deliver.)

From definitives to commemoratives

It’s to philately that I owe my earliest lessons, not only in geography but also politics and graphic design. Not to mention cupidity. Stamp collecting really is an education. It’s a shame to see how far from popular the whole business is today. Is there any hope? Could Freddie Mercury’s stamp collection, currently on display at the National Postal Museum, bring philately back into fashion? The late lead singer of Queen took up the pastime during his childhood in Zanzibar, where British postage stamps no doubt seemed as exotic to him as Tanzanian stamps did to me a decade later. But it’s hard to see Queen fans following suit today.

And there’s Thomas Pynchon’s cult novel The Crying of Lot 49. The book has a labyrinthine plot that is dominated by postage stamps and postal services (notably the nineteenth century Thurn and Taxis post, successor to the Reichspost of the Holy Roman Empire). But the global success of Thomas Pynchon’s novels has not kindled a campus stamp collecting craze. If someone were to write a novel called Stamp Collecting, it would most likely turn out, like Trainspotting, to be about something else.

British definitive stamps – the elegantly minimalist design with the Queen’s head in cameo that we see each day in the UK (each day, that is, when the post comes) – are a triumph of branding, of the assertion of corporate identity. They are simple but instantly recognisable. The profile of the Queen’s head is designed to echo the image of the head of Queen Victoria on the old penny black of 1840. A design consultant charged with spinning the image of a multinational corporation might envy the degree of continuity in this elegant and unmistakable miniature advertisement for UK Ltd. The elegance is enhanced by the absence of words. By convention – I guess because a Briton invented them – there are no words at all on current British definitive stamps. Simply a numeral, colour-coded, and the image of the queen. A silent monarch rules serene. It’s as though the last decade, with all its humiliations for the royal family, had never happened.

British commemoratives, or ‘special stamps’ as the Post Office now rather dully calls them, are another achievement in graphic design. Some of the credit for this belongs to Tony Benn, who launched the first of a tide of new stamps when he was Postmaster-General in the 1964–66 Labour government. Since that time there has been a torrent of new designs, made for collectors and bought as investments, and every other country has followed suit. Philately is not really a hobby anymore (the word ‘hobby’ itself has a dated air). Today’s stamp-collectors are more like curators, or investors. They are custodians, not only of the childhood pleasures of people like myself, but of a global treasury of graphic design, cultural politics and nationalist mythology.

At its best, the postage stamp is a triumph of design, a rare art of miniature, like a Moghul painting or an Elizabethan court portrait, one that should be more widely recognised, whose small compass should not obscure its wider meaning, nor its intricate delights. ✭