Stamps: the weird and the wonderful
The Weird
Weird by accident
The first stop on this tour is the disadvantaged who are those intended to be standard stamps but matters outside their control propelled them into a less frequented stamp sidestreet. A good example of this weird but ‘not by design’, is the France 1849 1f Dark Vermilion Ceres, ‘Bearded Lady’, which should be nothing other than a goddess of print but whether the fault of the artist, Jacques-Jean Barre, or the engraver, Anatole Hulot, the printing exhibits an error of grooming.
The clean shaven stamp on the left is what our Ceres was intended to look like, with the stamp on the right, our ‘bearded lady’, the product of a slip of the blade or perhaps a bit of fluff on the plate. Whilst there are many such freaks one which is irresistible because of its association with our hobby is an adhesive produced to celebrate 100 years of United States stamps, for the International Stamp Exhibition in Monaco, the 1947 40c that features, rather poetically, a stamp collecting President Roosevelt. At first glance there is not too much to concern us and we could very well trundle by, consigning this piece of postage to the mainstream, but if you look more closely at the hand clutching the stamp you’ll see there are six fingers instead of five. Check the history books and there is no mention of a six-fingered US president, a few may well have had six-figure salaries, so one can only assume this is all a bit of unintentional weirdness, but surely not by design, because like our French Ceres nobody would intentionally portray such an anointed personages as weird… would they?
