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Balboa Press AU - Christopher B. Yardley

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278 pages

English

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Extrait

Description

What is the stamp designer wanting to say – has perception of the event changed with time? Is the image a ‘mirror’, reflecting what we already know or is it a ‘lens’ – requiring we think further?

Sujets

Military history

Informations

Publié par	Balboa Press AU
Date de parution	28 novembre 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781982295950
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	17 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0200€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Other Wars of the 20th Century

Stories told through postage stamps

Christopher B. Yardley PhD

Copyright © 2022 Christopher B. Yardley PhD.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Balboa Press
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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

ISBN: 978-1-9822-9594-3 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-9822-9595-0 (e)

Balboa Press rev. date: 11/25/2022

Keywords :

Human conflict
Military history
Military history on postage stamps
Social history on postage stamps
The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939
The Arab- Israeli Conflicts from 1948
The Korean War 1950-1953
The Vietnam War 1955-1975
The Cold War 1947-1991
The Afghanistan War from 1979
The Falklands War 1982
The Gulf War 1990-1991.

Front cover image : North Korea 1975 : A single stamp from the set of eight images entitled “The 30 th anniversary of the Korean Workers’ Party”.

Back cover image : (Still celebrating, still aggressive Nation Building under the Kim Regime) North Korea 2020 : Military Parade for the 75 th Anniversary of North Korea .

Preface
The devil’s in the detail, they say. And as far as the miniscule art form of stamp design is concerned, this couldn’t be more true. The amount of contemplation and concentration involved in creating such a diminutive image is sizeable. Every pixel counts, every micro-millimetre needs to do its bit.
But of course, a stamp can only say so much. It’s an impression, a small window to people and stories and celebrations, a cue to find out more.
By presenting (these) diverse subjects in summary and in detail, we hope to give you a fresh perspective. After all, our stamps may be small, but their scope and ambition are enormous (Editorial (2010), “The big picture”, Royal Mail Year Book).

This is the third reference I shall publish to complement previous studies.
“A Great War Study – the Centenary commemorative postage stamps 2014-2018”, (2019), Canberra, Cannava House Publications. ISBN 9780648667100.
“The Second World War representing world conflict on postage stamps” (2022), Balboa Press.
Volume One : ISBN 978-1-9822-9297-3 / e-ISBN : 978-1-9822-9298-0.
Volume Two : ISBN 978-1-9822-9299-7 / e-ISBN : 978-1-9822-9300-0.

Introduction
The message that the stamp designer depicts in his stamp design reflects the history of the event as perceived on the date of the design. That same event, when viewed over time may have changed making the media a living reflection of that history.
As with most stamp collectors I have watched the dramatic decrease in the amount of mail distributed by the world’s post offices since the 1990s because of the Internet phenomena. With the acceptance of QR code I can envisage the day when the postage stamp containing an appropriate message becomes very rare indeed.
I argue that this will be a valuable medium lost.
To date to overcome the loss in revenues post offices have responded by increasing the number of stamp issues they release at higher prices. This has been compounded, in my mind by the four main stamp agencies who provide postal services to their client country postal administrations.
As the hobby of stamp collecting has evolved the collector, and the support industry behind it has suggested that the keen collector wants to acquire complete sets of stamps including any different format that is available – an unused (mint) stamp, a used example, the same design printed by a different printer, printing anomalies, single copies or the stamps published in miniature sheets including a number of different value pre-paid mail service fees.
The humble postage stamp
A postage stamp is no more than the pre-payment of a service fee to a postal authority for the movement of an article from one place to another. The different service fees correspond to the authorities published tariff of charges that generally reflect the weight, speed of delivery and destination of the item being submitted for posting. Classically the stamp must have been publicly available over a country’s post office counters for six months and sold at the face-value, the service fee, shown on the stamp. Before the stamp / service fee token is affixed to an article to be posted and delivered it is known as a ‘mint’ stamp. When the token, affixed to the article to be carried, is accepted the post office cancels it with a postmark signifying the stamp has been used.
The postal authorities fall neatly into two categories. Those who control their own processes and those that out-source their stamp production and marketing to an alternate supplier. The dominant company providing the highest level of support to postal authorities is The Inter-Governmental Philatelic Corporation, or IGPC that represents over 70 different countries in the design, production, and marketing of postage stamps. It also assists postal administrations with the running of their postal services. IGPC claim to produce nearly half of the different postage stamps issued each year but have been criticised for inappropriate and excessive issues.
It is the smaller, less established authorities who tend to seek help. The collecting public is protected from the latter as the world’s most established stamp-dealers and sales rooms concentrate upon the goods from the former group. The established dealers have guidelines to check the bona-fides of the postal authorities as described in the previous paragraph.
Postage stamps have existed since 1840. All countries issue stamps and many of them use stamps to publicise their culture or special occasions. Stamps are also issued on almost every subject you can think of. Military historical subjects are used, on average for 5% of a country’s stamp images. Authoritarian States issue a higher number of military and historical images as an element of their Nation-building as we shall see when we look at the stamps of North Korea.
A short discussion of the commercialization of state sovereignty
A postal system can run with a minimal variety of postage stamps, but nearly all jurisdictions print many. The jurisdictions use the opportunity to honour their own citizens, induce pride in country, promote the attractions of the locale to potential tourists, and make political propaganda points. In addition, domestic users of the postal system may be more inclined to use it rather than private alternatives, if they exist, depending on how attractive the stamps are. However, many countries sponsor the production and sale of stamps that are marketed to collectors outside the country and, indeed, never see the country of issue at all. Why not put Elvis on your postage stamps if it entices foreign collectors to buy your country’s postage stamps (and never make use of the local postal services)? Some historical episodes suggest corruption-related costs. In a study of corruption in the South Pacific, Larmour (1997) found a link between smallness and corruption in the trade in “tokens of sovereignty,” such as postage stamps, passports, and, in the case of Tuvalu, an Internet domain name. Larmour and Barcham (2005) note that in the 1970s in the Cook Islands the state agency charged with selling postage stamps to collectors became a slush fund for the government’s election campaigning.
Most of these stamps never reach the issuing country’s shores, and are designed, produced, and marketed by a foreign agency to stamp collectors around the world. The sale of postage stamps to collectors is an example of what Palan (2002) calls the “commercialization of state sovereignty.” Putting Elvis on one’s stamps seems to be a benign enough phenomenon, as do certain other acts of commercialization. The Pacific island nation of Tuvalu achieved some renown by selling the rights to use its Internet domain 684 Slemrod name (.tv), a deal that brings in about 15 percent of its GDP annually. This staggering number suggests that such commercialization can bring nontrivial, indeed quite substantial, per-capita benefits to small countries like Tuvalu (Slemrod and Wilson (2007).
Geographers, political scientists and historians have used stamps to study how states present themselves to their own residents and those beyond. Stamps represent visual products of a state’s identity.
Sources for the stamps I have reproduced in this book
I have used my own collection as much as I can. I choose to only collect, for the most part, stamps that have fulfilled their niche role and have been used to carry mail. The postal authority has officially cancelled these stamps with, hopefully, a circular date-stamp showing the entry point into the system and that date of posting. Occasionally this ‘spoils’ the image, but not often. I have chosen to use the sharpest image that I have when