A History of Britain in Thirty-Six Postage Stamps

Issued in England in 1840, the “Penny Black,” named for its price and background color, was the world’s first postage stamp, which provides West a starting point for a concise, readable history of modern Britain. His conceit is clever: using postage stamps as a lens through which he focuses on historical events and issues from 1840 to the present: “Stamps tell stories” he writes. “They speak to us across generations.” The author, clearly a keen philatelist, offers a broad overview of Britain’s historical events and issues, from the Victorian era and the Industrial Revolution to the “Jubilee Olympic Britain” of 2012. He is good at explicating stamp design and subject matter, and finds connections between stamps and historical events—though sometimes he stretches this a bit too far. For example, the 1848 “Penny Red” stamp provides West an entrée into the devastating potato famine that impacted millions, but the only link to the stamp is its Irish postmark. Similarly, the financial crisis in 2008 is “illustrated” by a stamp commemorating Lloyd’s of London issued in 1999. But there is cultural history to be found in these miniature art forms, and West has certainly found it, providing a quirky, and always interesting, overview of modern British history. (Nov.)