Unless you are an utterly insane stamp lover who dreams about Penny Blacks and Treskilling Yellows you probably find these things rather boring. Not these weird stamps, though. These are strangely thrilling and captivating.
The Dragon Stamp
If there is one thing missing from most stamps these days it is the everyday image of a guy with no shirt on kneeling on top of a dying dragon. Don’t you think? There are a surprising number of stamps with dragons on them across the world but none of the others are as stunningly strange as this one.
The Coffee Stamp
You might think that these are common enough stamps with some coffee images on them. You’d be hopelessly wrong, you fool. Instead, these Brazilian stamps were varnished using coffee beans. This makes them smell delicious and the smell is said to last for 5 years, provided that you don’t drink them before then.
The Yoda Stamp
Am I the only person who finds Yoda intensely irritating? This guy really doesn’t deserve his own stamp, in my humble opinion but what do I know? The US Postal Service brought out a bunch of special Star Wars stamps and the public voted that this one should remain in use as a separate stamp.
The Malaria Stamp
This is the creepiest stamp I’ve seen yet, as it is dedicated to raising awareness of the dangers of malaria in the Republic of the Congo.
The Nocturnal Animals Stamp
How would like to receive a letter from an old friend and see these scary chaps looking out at you? It turns out that nocturnal animals in Malaysia only come out at night because they are so blooming ugly.
The Tinfoil Stamp
Do you remember the heady days of the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics? The Battle of the Brians, the Jamaican bobsleigh team and Eddie the Eagle had us glued to our screens during the whole chilly event. However, I don’t think I had ever seen Bolivia’s tinfoil commemorative stamps before today. Supposedly they are the only tinfoil stamps in the world.
The Mickey Mouse Stamp
Can anyone tell me what the good people of Antigua & Barbuda drink before designing their stamps? In this one, we find the world’s highest earning mouse with a seal and some sort of giant squid. It says Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea down the bottom, so I’m guessing that the rodent has a film or other money making enterprise of that name.
The Pixies and Snail Stamp
If anyone was foolish enough to let me design stamps this is the kind of thing I would come up. It’s a pixie sitting on top of a snail. What’s not to like about it? This is from the UK and is part of a set of stamps with mythical creatures on them. It must be the snail that is mythical, as I’m pretty sure that pixies really exist.
The Stamps that Broke the Rules
While I was writing about the last one a trivia question from my childhood came flooding back into my mind. You see, the rule in the UK was always that only dead people or royalty (who are usually barely alive anyway) could appear on stamps. So, who was the first person to break that tradition? It was none other than Queen drummer Roger Taylor. In an apparent oversight he appeared in the background of a stamp featuring the late Freddy Mercury.
