How They Did That Amazing Stamp Thing

Margaret Marks has revealed the secret of how the publishers did that Hans Fallada stamp thing! You can design your own stamps online! I just SO nearly got twenty "I <3 german books" stamps made up... until I saw the price.

But it remains my pipe dream. If you're ever stuck for a gift I'm sure almost anyone would be thrilled to receive lovingly designed legal tender German postage stamps. Or is that just me?

Hans Fallada Postage Stamp (Mark II)

I've posted about German writers on stamps before, so I was rather taken by a brief piece in the trade mag Börsenblatt about a new Hans Fallada stamp, which was in some mysterious way issued by his publishers, Aufbau Verlag. I'm not quite sure how publishers manage to issue postage stamps, but apparently it's worth 55c (enough to send a small letter inside Germany), it's being given away to selected booksellers and journalists – and you can actually use it. And they also wanted to encourage the finance minister to use the picture for an official stamp. But there's not much chance of that, I'm afraid, for despite having posthumously sold a whopping 150,000 copies of the new extended director's cut of Jeder stirbt für sich allein, Hans Fallada already had his own stamp back in 1993.

A shame, really, that the German post office won't be doing the publisher's advertising for them free of charge. Although it is about time they put another writer on a stamp - the last one was Borges back in October of last year, marking Argentina's spot as guest of honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

Ah, literature meets philately - possibly one of the nerdiest combinations ever. Mind you, I did see a guy the other day wearing a "Star Wars Sucks" T-shirt. I think only a T-shirt printed with a fictitious Arno Schmidt postage stamp could possibly top that. And one day I'll get round to posting about German trains named after writers.

More Literary Philately - Der Briefmark

I got a book through the post yesterday, with another fantastic literary stamp on it. This time it was honouring the 125th anniversary of Joachim Ringelnatz' birth, complete with the perfect poem for the occasion - "der Briefmark". Actually a loyal reader had pointed the poem out last time, but I hadn't seen the stamp itself - it's worth 85c, which is a bit of an unusual value. It features the poet's slightly silly silhouette, and you have to rotate either your head or your small parcel in order to read the text.

You can read the poem itself in German and English translation (by Ernest A. Seemann) here.

Literary Philately (German)

I still send invoices out on paper, and I still prefer actually licking stamps to the new-fangled self-adhesive kind. And I like to choose stamps by the pictures on them, so I occasionally go to the special philately counter at my local post office. Today I bought 5 Franz Kafkas and 5 Klaus Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg and Helmuth James Graf von Moltke. The man at the counter told me, incidentally, that someone asked for "the Tom Cruise stamp" the other day.

The Kafka stamp is illustrated with a sketch by the author, which seems to show someone in a state of despair at a desk. The writing is vertical, just to make you feel slightly unsure which way round to stick it. I stuck it vertically, which seemed appropriately incorrect.

There's nothing like an official Deutsche Post stamp to show a writer has entered the canon. Over the past few years, they've philatelised Adalbert Stifter, Hermann Hesse, Astrid Lindgren, Joachim Ringelnatz and now also Golo Mann. And the organisation Aktion Patenschaften für verbrannte Bücher has a list of authors whose books were burned by the Nazis, which also tells you which of them have been stampified. It seems Deutsche Post is trying to make amends for Goebbels' crimes by putting as many of these writers on stamps as possible: Brecht, Kafka (twice), Kästner, Kisch, Kolb, Lasker-Schüler, Thomas Mann (twice), Werfel and Zuckmayer.