Stamps and Stories
A history of postage stamps: how they began in Britain, then Austria-Hungary 1850–1918 and Czechoslovakia to 1945, with the story of every issue.
Before the postage stamp10 stamps
Before there were postage stamps there were duty stamps. From 28 June 1694 English legal documents had to carry an embossed stamp to show that the tax on them had been paid: the Act was passed to pay for the war against France, and forging a stamp was punishable by death. On parchment the embossing would not hold, so it was struck on a small piece of paper, usually blue, fixed to the document with a strip of tin that was covered on the back by a printed label bearing the royal cypher. The Smithsonian's National Postal Museum notes that these cypher labels are thought to have inspired the first adhesive postage stamps.
Great Britain 1840–187058 stamps
Where postage stamps begin. The Penny Black went on sale in May 1840 and the Two Pence Blue days after it, and to this day the country that invented the stamp is the only one that does not have to put its name on it. A small run of examples rather than the whole country: the line-engraved issues, the embossed high values, and the first surface-printed Victorians.
Austria-Hungary 1850–19181911 stamps
The stamps of the Habsburg monarchy, from the first issue of 1850 to the collapse of the Dual Monarchy in 1918. Austria and Hungary ran separate postal administrations after the Compromise of 1867, and the joint Ministry of Finance, the Levant consular offices and the wartime field post each issued stamps of their own. Alongside them are Lombardy-Venetia, Austria's Italian crown land, lost in 1859 and 1866, the offices on Crete, and Liechtenstein, whose post Austria ran until 1921.
- 1850–1918Austria522 stamps
- 1850–1866Lombardy-Venetia42 stamps
- 1863–1918Austrian Post in the Turkish Empire128 stamps
- 1868–1918Hungary465 stamps
- 1879–1918Bosnia and Herzegovina440 stamps
- 1903–1914Austrian Post in Crete36 stamps
- 1912–1918Liechtenstein18 stamps
- 1914–1918Austro-Hungarian Military Post260 stamps
Czechoslovakia 1918–19451313 stamps
From the Hradčany issue of December 1918 to the end of the war in 1945. The period covers the First Republic, the Legion post in Siberia, the Teschen plebiscite, the single stamp of Carpatho-Ukraine, the two wartime states that replaced the republic between 1939 and 1945, and the souvenir sheets made abroad during the war and just after it.