Qualla: British Library Philatelic Collections

British Library Philatelic Collections: Introduction

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nevit Dilmen (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1971 the police walked into the British Museum and arrested the Assistant Keeper of the Philatelic Collections. James A. Mackay had been quietly removing progressive die proofs - test prints of stamp designs - that should have been returned to the Crown Agents and destroyed. He swapped them, oddly, for Winston Churchill commemoratives worth £400. The proofs themselves were valued at £7,600. He was fined £1,000, dismissed, and replaced - in a piece of institutional jiu-jitsu that the British civil service does well - with one of the investigating police officers, Bob Schoolley-West. This was just one Tuesday in the long, peculiar life of the largest stamp collection in the United Kingdom.

Image: Nevit Dilmen (talk) | CC BY-SA 3.0

British Library Philatelic Collections: How a Library Acquired Eight Million Stamps

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nevit Dilmen (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. It started in 1890 with a request and two albums. Hubert Haes donated his and Walter Van Noorden's stamp collection to the British Museum Library, with the stipulation that the library would build a philatelic collection around it. The following year that condition was made real ...

Image: Nevit Dilmen (talk) | CC BY-SA 3.0

British Library Philatelic Collections: The Press That Made the Postage Stamp

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit British Government for Jamaican postal service, Public domain. The largest single object in the British Library is not a book. It is the Perkins D cylinder press, patented in 1819 by the American-born inventor Jacob Perkins. The press was one of several that printed the first British postage stamps in 1840 - the Penny Black, the Two Pence Bl...

Image: British Government for Jamaican postal service | Public domain

British Library Philatelic Collections: Rarities and Curiosities

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AgnosticPreachersKid. Original uploader was AgnosticPreachersKid at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. The collection's holdings veer between sober national archives and frankly bizarre objects. There's the pilot's licence of Captain John Alcock, who in 1919 made the first non-stop transatlantic flight. There's a complete fantasy stamp collection from Terry Pratchett's Discworld n...

Image: AgnosticPreachersKid. Original uploader was AgnosticPreachersKid at en.wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

British Library Philatelic Collections: The Stamp That Almost Was

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nevit Dilmen (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. Sometimes the most interesting artefacts are the ones that were never released. In 1956, Jamaica issued a £1 stamp in chocolate and violet showing tobacco growing and cigar making - a colonial design from George VI's reign. When Elizabeth II came to the throne, the first plan was...

Image: Nevit Dilmen (talk) | CC BY-SA 3.0

British Library Philatelic Collections: The Quiet Work of Cataloguing

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Fæ, CC BY-SA 3.0. Most of the action now is digital. Richard Scott Morel, who joined as curator in 2014, has been overseeing the slow, careful work of putting the collection online. The Row Collection - 23 volumes, 1,358 pages, 24,473 items documenting the stamps and postal stationery of Siam from...

Image: Fæ | CC BY-SA 3.0