Wednesday, October 15, 2014

Going Postal

Philatelist Michael R. Maranda brings us postage stamps imported from the city of Ankh-Morpork.  I'm a sucker for postal props.


5 comments:

Oneiros said...

Ever visited the Cunning Artificer?

http://www.discworldemporium.com/discworld-stamps

Ministry Minion said...

Those are stamps from the Cunning Artificer (now Discworld Emporium : http://www.discworldemporium.com/ )
They were created for the release of the novel in 2004, originally only those mentioned in said novel.
Sold in Little Brown Envelopes, you got a mix which could contain sports (rarities due to misprints).
In the following years, some of the rarer reached incredible prices.

Now most places on Discworld have been given stamps, and the styles are reminiscent of early 'Roundworld' stamps. While most are printed by a large firm, some were printed using an engraved zinc plate. Quite a few are still perforated at the shop, using an old manual perforator which was refurbished.

For more info, have a poke around the forum http://www.discworldemporium.com/forum/

Propnomicon said...

@ Oneiros, Ministry Minion

Oh, Sweet Fancy Moses. I hate you both. I'm already up to my eyeballs with packages of bizarre items and you point me toward yet another wallet sink.

It never even occured to me that there were Discworld props, much less an entire line of collectable stamps.

CoastConFan said...

I didn’t know that they actually produced the stamps, which appeared in Going Postal. I scanned the stamps from the book to make my own for prop use and did my own coloring. I hadn’t thought of them for years. When I was a kid I collected 19th century colonial possession stamps because they were very diverse and rather inexpensive. I never did get my 1853 Cape of Good Hope triangle. My interest in that case was a convergence of stamp collecting and reading SF. The protagonist of the Cordwainer Smith story Norstrillia, lusted after one of those stamps. Then Discworld came along with a stamp-driven story and that link between SF and philatelic activities …

Oneiros said...

I've visited the shop on several occasions. (It's only about 35 miles up the road from me.)

It's decked out to look like a post office in there. They even have a cat. Last time, I picked up my qualification from the UU in Cruel & Unusual Geography. The lady in the shop not only packed the graduation certificate in front of us, but they stuck stamps on the box, and franked it too.

The shop itself (in Wincanton, Somerset), is owned by Bernard Pearson who was mentioned in the comments re: Buried Treasure.