COLLECTORS' CORNER

Taranaki Daily News, 12 November 1938, Page 14 (Supplement)

COLLECTORS' CORNER

PORTRAITS OF ROYALTY. Have you looked through your stamps and carefully examined portraits of the Kmgs and Queens appearing on some of them? If you have, I think you'll agree that there are a few which certainly do not flatter the royal personages. An early stamps of Mauritius shows a picture of Queen Victoria that makes her look as if she was suffering from toothache! The same applies to the 2)d and 5d. issues of New Zealand, they shocked everyone when they came out in 1882. New Zealand has been almost as unkir.d with a picture of King George V. on the penny, two shilling and three - sl.-illing stamps of 1926. They were the worst of all the stamp portraits of the beloved King as you will see if you compare them with specimens from the West Indies, India, Canada, Africa and other places. You may care to get together a little collection of strange stamps faces, apart from the unfiattering ones of Kings and Queens. You can start with a few of the early Argentina Republic issues and then pass on to Bulgaria and Greece for your subjects. On the other hand, the pictures of Famous Chinese gentlemen on the stamps of that country are mostly extremely good. The portrait of General Chiang Kai-shek, on the 1929 issue that commemorated the "Unification of China" is one of the best of all. And it is said that the picture of Dr. Sun. Yat Sen, the first President of the Republic of China seen on the 1931 series, is an excellent likeness that is even better than the original photograph. Some Wcird Stamps. After queer stamps let us turn to those with weird designs. To start we cannot do better than look at the early Armenian issues. In 1920 a whole series of extraordinary stamps appeared, the pictures taken from ancient sculptures and wall paintings. In this collection of oddities you'll find a horse that looks very unlike that noble animal, a queer (lying creature with a human face, and a dragon like monster that is surely the most hideous thing ever used to adorn i postage stamp. In 1876 and 1880 stamps of Poonch, a native State in India, consisted of hundreds of crude squiggles that represented native writing. Luckily the State decided later to use Indian stamps, or we might have had even stranger designs from Poonch. I cannot leave out the peculiar stamps of Afghanistan which appeared between 1870 and 1894. Afterwards they became much better, but some of the faces pictured in the centres of the early specimens must be the weirdest in the world. The one in the middle of the 1874 appears to have his tongue out, whilst that on the stamp of 187) looks like half a coconut with eyes, a nose and a mouth painted on it. Look for yourself and see if I am not right. One queer thing about the Afghanistan stamps is the fact that they were dcted, in native characters, over 500 years before, the systern of counting the years being different over there from that in Europe and else where.