Something prompted me last night to pull a manila envelope out of a plastic bin which holds a collection of stamps started when I was in elementary school. I can’t remember the last time I looked in this envelope – at least a couple years – and I had forgotten how many stamps I have, probably a few thousand. What you see above is just a small sampling, but it shows how they’ve been stored all this time, a few small glassine envelopes holding stamps, other just piled in loosely.
As I was pulling out piles of stamps last night and looking through them, I had a new appreciation for what is basically a collection of mini-artworks. So many interesting images, so many stories. I have photographed some of them and asked Google Gemini what they are, and am getting some interesting stories. Let’s take a look at a couple …
Most of the stamps I have include the postmarks, as I pulled them off envelopes over the years. This one is a 2012 Year of the Dragon Forever stamp. It was part of the United States Postal Service’s “Celebrating Lunar New Year” series, designed to celebrate the animals of the Chinese zodiac. The colorful dragon head is what caught my attention from the pile of stamps before me. It may be a little hard to see with the postmark, but there’s a small gold-reflective image of a paper-cut design of a dragon, which was created by an artist named Clarence Lee – there’s some biographical information on him here, and a selection of other stamps that he designed on the Smithsonian website here – completely different in style, but quite gorgeous.
But Clarence Lee is just the artist of the small cut-out dragon image; the main image of the colorful dragon head used by dancers during Lunar New Year parades is by the artist Kam Mak, whose bio is also on the Smithsonian site here. He lives in Brooklyn and you can see a very-clean look at this same stamp here.
I like the idea that in Chinese culture, the dragon is considered a symbol of power, luck, and renewed hope for the future.
Continuing in the theme of Asian art, check out this stamp featuring the art of the legendary Japanese artist Utagawa Hiroshige:
This particular art work comes from Hiroshige’s masterpiece series, “The Fifty Three Stations of the Tokaido.” The scene depicts the morning mist (known as “Mishima”), with travelers departing early in the morning. One traveler is on a packhorse, and the others are being carried in a “kago” (or “palanquin”), which is a box-like enclosed chair – you can see more examples of this here, since the image on the stamp is pretty small.
But other than the art, going back to the stamp itself, it was produced in Japan in 2008. You’ll see the word “Nippon” in the top left; Nippon is a formal way of pronouncing the native name of Japan. The term “Nippon” (日本) literally means “source of the sun” or “sun origin,” and it reflects Japan’s eastern location (relative to the Asian continent), and provides the perception that the sun rises first in Japan.
Despite being a Japanese stamp, you’ll see that the words “International Letter Writing Week 2008” are in English at the bottom of the stamp. This is an annual event in Japan, usually in the fall, where the Japanese postal service releases stamps featuring classic art to encourage the traditional art of letter writing. Keep in mind this is 2008 – an interesting question might be, how many people write letters in 2026?
From a late night grab into an old storage bin, this pull of my old stamp collection revealed two interesting stories from a collection of a thousand stamps or more. I think I’ll enjoy looking through more of them and see what else I can find … stay tuned.