Our Postage Stamp Competition

The Weekly Machen

Don’t allow the banality in the title of the following article to trick you into skipping it. True, Arthur Machen was often given assignments which could be described as hackwork. However, time and time again, I have found our great stylist transmuting the ordinary with a wonder of mystery. This weekly column is full of examples of Machen working his literary power on vegetable stands, flower-shows, hop gardens, and now… poster stamps.

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Our Poster Stamp Competition:
A Glance at the Designs
by
Arthur Machen
April 29, 1915

On Friday next. May 1 The Evening News, Poster Stamp Competition will be closed, and soon after judgment will be given as to who has sent in the best design and won the prize of twenty guineas.

And I have been looking at sheaves upon sheaves of stamps, and wondering not a little at this new art form. For your true, ideal poster stamp is a paradox; it is a conjuring of the huge into the compass of the minute. An ox in a teacup, the ingenious advertisement makes boast; and here in the poster stamp you conjure your bold and broad effects, displayed on twenty feet of wall space, into the dimensions of a miniature. I believe Doré would have excelled in this new way of art; for he revelled in vast aerial perspectives, in huge theatrical canvases; and yet in some of the drawings in the Contes Drolatiques he has pictured vastness in thumbnail limits.

But what is a Poster Stamp? It is a design which may be affixed in the adhesive fashion of the common stamp of the post office on any document or letter, on any bill, warrant, quittance or obligation, I suppose, which a firm or an individual may issue or utter. Its end is the end of the big poster; that is advertisement.

Mr. Hassall, the prince of poster-artists, predicts that firms now unknown may likely enough become famous through their striking and original poster-stamps. Why not?

The house of Pears emerged from an obscure existence of almost a hundred years by means of “Bubbles”; and I see no reason why some honest little bookmaker in a back street should not become illustrious through a stamp bearing the design of the seven-leagued boots in blue and gold and scarlet.

Germany as Pioneer

The invention of the new form belongs, I believe, to Germany. Mr. Hassall says that he designed a stamp for a mustard firm seventeen years ago, but Germany had its decorative stamps as early as 1894. The antiquaries of the subject, who have pierced into tho dim mists of twenty years ago, say that of old time in Germany—that is up to the ‘seventies of the last century—all letters had to be sealed with wax. Then, an imitation seal, made of paper, was allowed, and as the wax had often borne impressions of coat-armour, monograms, and such devices, so the substituted paper seals in due course received design and decoration.

Philanthropic societies adopted some significant device on their seal, patriotic leagues saw the benefit of the idea, large business firms perceived the new and sweet use of this advertisement. So the paper seal was transmuted with the poster stamp, and now there are poster stamp exhibitions—the first was held in 1909—and a new philately has arisen. The stamps are collected and bought and exchanged. The eager sportsman will chase all over the Continent for a specimen of that rare Schmidt issue of 1906—the famous stamp that shows the blacksmith at his fiery forge—and there are great tales of the unique Rugen; a golden Venus rising from the blue waves of the North Sea.

Art and Advertisement

It is The Evening News, I am glad to say, that has brought this most commendable fashion into England. Commendable, because it is going to benefit so many sorts and conditions of men. The man of business will not be slow to find out the benefit of this novel form of advertisement. Advertising is becoming a well-established artifice; but whereas once it was only necessary to shout loud enough, now the shout, if it is to be effective, must be something of a song. Advertisement must have art in it. A novel and excellent form of advertising is certain to attract a new public. There are many people whom the large appeal of the polling station leaves indifferent; they will be captured by these tiny square inches of curious design.

Then the poster stamp will provide the artists with a new field, and a field for the exercise of their nicest ingenuity. Mr. Walter Crane, for this very reason, has the warmest welcome for the new form; he has noted how few are the opportunities in England for the work of good designers. Add to the list of the benefited the mystery and art of colour printing; and perhaps the chiefest joys of all will fall to the great tribe of the collectors, with whom I always sympathise, whom I always envy, though I have never had the patience to collect anything myself.

Dome of St. Paul’s

But think of the novel delights that await these admirable men, the hunters of rare things, the people who go through the world always on the lookout for some desirable object that may evade them for years—and may suddenly be presented to their thirsty eyes as they cross the road in Islington or take a short cut down Putney way. The Evening News is getting ready poster-stamp albums for these ingenious and happy and deserving folks.

As I have said, I have been looking through the hundreds of designs sent in for the twenty-guinea competition. The best, I think, are those which have been done on the lines laid down by Mr. Walter Crane; that have adhered to simplicity and to a certain heraldic form of decorative art. Many, of course, have gone astray by being pictorial, by forgetting that the poster stamp is really a poster painted small. But what struck me chiefly in the collection was the immense popularity of the Dome of St. Paul’s. I believe that the dome appears in fifty per cent. of the designs. It stands out, black, against flaming sunset skies; it is a pink dome rising into a purple heaven, it is in gold upon a blue sky, it is green under a silver moon, and black again, as a great flaming scarlet sun sinks in the west. The Dome of St. Paul’s is combined with owls and bats and stars and telephones and telegraphic wires; it looms vast over all the Poster Stamp Competition.

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