Philatelic Friday: the Victorian Age
I've always had a casual love of stamps and just came across a shoebox of mostly used stamps that I must have hoarded in the 80's (the collage of Swatch watches, images from Rolling Stone, and the stars of "Sixteen Candles" on the outside is a bit of a giveaway). Here's a peek inside:
Anyhow, there are a lot of cool stamps swimming around in there and I thought it would be fun to share some in an alliterative feature. There are tons of cool botanical stamps, landscape stamps, historical figure stamps, cultural stamps, and way more Christmas stamps than I could have imagined, and I will get to some of those in coming weeks, but I thought I'd start off with this one:
This British stamp caught my eye because of Beeton's Book of Household Management. I'd never heard of it until we recently saw Masterpiece Theater's "The Secret Life of Mrs. Beeton" (she was the Martha Stewart of her time and a publisher with her husband). I was confused by the rest of the stamp though, as I didn't think Mrs. Beeton ever looked that fancy. It turns out this stamp is one of four from 1987 commemorating the 150th anniversary of Queen Victoria's accession. So that's the Queen, Prince Albert, and the Great Eastern along with Mrs. Beeton's book, which clearly left its mark as a great accomplishment of the Victorian Age.