Cover Stories

The World through a Letterbox

In 1840 Sir Rowland Hill revolutionised the Royal Mail postal service, which included making the sender, rather than the recipient, pay the Penny Post to all destinations. Soon afterwards came the idea to sell little stickers to cover the cost of sending a letter. It seemed to catch on fairly well.

And even now in the post-email post-text 24/7 social media-ocratic world of SnapFace, InstaTwit and WhatsAgram, some people are still sending letters and postcards to each other and taking pleasure in sticking on those little works of art. More people than you might think.

And new generations are re-discovering the joy of Snail Mail. Is it the pace, the physicality, the texture of the thing. Perhaps it echoes the trend back towards vinyl records, a letter in the post could be the equivalent of the rumble and hiss of the needle in the groove. Of course there are quicker and more efficient ways to communicate, but you can’t tie a ribbon round a bunch of e-mails!

So here is my blog to celebrate not just those “grubby little bits of paper” but the journeys they have been on, the stories they tell and the lives that they connect. Welcome to Cover Stories.

Blog Posts

• A Free Front
  I was intrigued to find this “Free Front” in an album I recently acquired. It is a fragment from a… Read more: A Free Front
• More than meets the eye…
  Here is a very plain-looking postage stamp. It has not been used, so has no postal cancellations, but it has… Read more: More than meets the eye…
• Two Shilling Time Machine
  A part-used stamp booklet from 1935 Front Cover Amongst a treasure-trove of mint stamps from the 1940s, unearthed by my… Read more: Two Shilling Time Machine
• Ethiopian stamps (Part 1)
  An exhibit of early stamps from Ethiopia from the beginning of the Posts in 1894 to joining the Universal Postal… Read more: Ethiopian stamps (Part 1)
• PostDay – 20th January 2023
  On this page: Awesome Åland “In philately a maximum card (also known as a maxi-card, or maxicard) is a postcard with a postage stamp placed on the picture… Read more: PostDay – 20th January 2023