New Issue of Note – Australian Legends of Football

As a fan of the engraved postage stamp, particularly those of Austria and those created by Czesław Słania (pronounced chess-wahv swah-nya), I have found it difficult to embrace many of the newer issues employing photographic processes in their production. Too often the stamps lack any aesthetic appeal, looking more like stickers for a child’s picture album, or like polychrome picture postcards reduced to postage stamp size. And if you collect British Commonwealth, your stamp album will look more like the Royal Photo Album.

With letter-writing virtually a relic of the pre-twitter/pre-facebook/pre-email past, the challenge is on for postal agencies of all countries to create issues that will, if not encourage placing pen to paper, at least compel one to purchase as collectible keepsakes. To that end, we increasingly find new issues depicting contemporaneous subjects with popular cultural appeal. While, in the past, this was mainly the purview of the Gambias, Ghanas, and St. Vincents of the philatelic world. Nowadays even “respectable” collectible countries have glommed onto the idea that pop culture sells. Even the United States Postal Service, with it’s current rule that a person has to be dead at least 5 years before being honored on a stamp, is considering abolishing that requirement (much to the consternation of many US collectors), in order to be able to produce issues that will appeal to a wider current generation of potential collectors.

For myself, my love for the classic look aside, this is fine, as long as the stamps don’t end up looking like Pokemon stickers or self-adhesive sportscards.

This 1986 issue from Tuvalu looks like it came out of a pack of Topps cards.

Which brings me to the subject of this post, a new issue from Australia Post, entitled Australian Legends of Football. This set, issued January 20, 2012, depicts 4 legendary players of the past (in studio portraits with an action vignette in the background), and 4 current stars (shown in game time action), of each of the 4 forms of football played in Australia.

Australian Football Legends. Issued January 20, 2012.

The stamps are colorful, and display a fresh, contemporary design aesthetic, yet maintain an unmistakable identity (and dignity, so to speak) as postage stamps. Crop the perfs from the image, and nobody is going to mistake these as pictures of football trading cards. Kudos to Australia Post in showing that pop culture and postage stamps can coexist amicably. If the United States Postal Service follows AP’s lead in design and production quality, collectors of US postage stamps will have nothing to worry about when American idol stamps start rolling off the presses.