SOME STAMP FACTS

Daniel O’Connell became the first individual to feature on an Irish stamp in 1929. Since 1929, O’Connell is a one of a small number of people shown in two issues, including Wolfe Tone and Arthur Guinness. However St Patrick tops the list, for the most times featured. Less than ten per cent of the 400 or so individuals who have featured on Irish stamps between 1929 and today, have been women. In 2014, An Post had to withdraw the commemorative stamp for the Citizen Army because of the misidentification of the Army Leader, Captain Jack White. Although the stamp was on sale for less than ten minutes before it was withdrawn, a tiny number were sold which are now worth multiples of their face value. The word ‘philately’ was first recorded in 1865. In 1918, the US postal service sold 100 stamps bearing what looked like an overturned Curtiss Jn-4 or Jenny aircraft, in a printing error. One of the so-called Inverted Jenny stamps sold in 2007 for nearly $1 million. An unused Penny Black, the world’s first postage stamp, in mint condition can sell for as much as £10,000. The British Guiana One-Cent Magenta stamp set a new world auction record for any stamp when it was sold for almost $9.5 million in 2014, nearly one billion times its original face value. In 1973, Bhutan issued a stamp that could play their national anthem if put on a record player. In 2013, Belgium issued stamps that smelt and tasted of chocolate. 1,000 rose-scented stamps were issued in the Indian State of Jharkhand to mark St Valentine’s Day this year.