I had fun with those Dinosaur stamps a few months back, and decided to dip my toes back into the world of ‘topical collecting’. So I made an order at a stamp shop for a few inexpensive packets of stamps in various categories, and over the next few months I’ll go through them here on the blog.
Let’s start right now with… mushroom stamps!
100 stamps cost me about $5. I chose mushrooms because they were cheap and I was amused that they existed as a category (“Why mushrooms?”). It wasn’t clear if the packet was 100 unique stamps or whether there would be doubles. Let’s see:
There were no doubles! In total there were 104 unique stamps from 14 countries: Mongolia, Afghanistan, Benin, Paraguay, Romania, Burkana Faso, North Korea, São Tomé and Principe, Kampuchea (Cambodia), Guyana, Guinea, Nicaragua, Hungary and the Soviet Union (Russia). The country from which I had the most was North Korea, with 12 stamps.
The stamps spanned 28 years from 1968 to 2006. The above example is one of the two oldest stamps and is North Korean. It’s also one of only a small handful that have been actually used, since (as with the dinosaur stamps) almost all of these are CTO stamps made for collectors and machine canceled. Most are therefore still gummed.
There’s a bewildering variety! The above (from Mongolia in 1985) are diagonally printed and very large and some of the prettiest in the packet.
Quite a few were still attached, like these Romanian ones from 1985. Most were illustrations, but there were some photographic stamps as well.
My favourites are probably the stamps from Hungary. Not only do they feature lovely line art, but they are actually textured and the ink seems slightly iridescent. This series contains stamps in two sizes as well, and these bigger ones must have looked lovely on a letter back in 1984!
Incidentally just because these are (mostly) CTO stamps doesn’t mean they weren’t also used for mail. Researching these stamps I found examples of some of them that had gone through the post, so unlike most of the dinosaur stamps it’s likely some of these were used by postal customers when they were released.
So why so many mushroom stamps?!? I’ve learned this is one of the most popular categories for topical stamps, and a catalogue printed only few months ago lists 6144 unique mushroom stamps! So my 104 is only 1.7% of those that exist. It’s a good thing I hate mushrooms else I may be tempted to chase them all 🙂
And so they’ve gone into my album, which still has lots of space left to fill. It’s a good thing I have several packets left to open…
Please make sure I see these when I visit!