Category Archives: Postage Stamps

British stamps, Freddie Mercury, Peter Blake, Postage Stamps

Peter Blake Designed a Millenium Stamp.

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I used to be a stamp collector but music and art took over. However, I did buy two complete sheets of the set of Beatles record cover stamps issued by the Royal Mail on 7th January, 2007.

The 2007 Beatles cover stamps.


These stamps showed six of the Beatles’ original thirteen album covers, including Peter Blake’s & Jann Haworth’s Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. These stamps were thus not designed by the cover artists.

I only recently discovered that Sir Peter Blake had actually designed a stamp. This was one of the Millenium series issued by the Royal Mail on 1st June, 1999, called The Entertainers Series and consisted of four stamps.

The Entertainer Series of GB Millenium stamps.


The Freddie Mercury stamp, I discovered, was designed by Peter Blake and I decided I would get a nice block of these. Douglas White, of Queen Fan Store, had a block of 25 of these on offer and, after a little haggling, they arrived.

The quarter sheet of Freddie Mercury stamps.

Douglas included the official Royal Mail postcard.

The official Royal Mail postcard depicting the stamp.

A nice addition to my collection of Peter Blake’s music-related art.

Banksy's art on Stamps, Postage Stamps

Banksy Has Made It onto Stamps.

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I used to collect stamps. I had a brilliant collection (I thought), but it just stayed in my cellar storage when I moved on to record collecting. Eventually I sold most of it, but I keep finding remnants — first day covers, or bits of sheets of stamps whenever I go through old boxes of books or such.

I saw that Madagascar (of all places) had released a set of stamps with Banksy’s art in 2018. They released two mini sheets — One with four Malagasy Ariary 18.00 postage stamps and the other with a single Malagasy Ariary 65.00 diamond-shaped stamp.

The Madagascan mini sheets.

Some further research, via that well-known research engine, Ebay, turned up an even earlier use of Banksy’s art on a mini sheet of stamps produced in a prestige stamp booklet by the Royal Mail on January 7th, 2010. This booklet was produced to celebrate famous record covers: Pink Floyd — The Division Bell, Coldplay — A Rush of Blood to the Head, Blur — Parklife, New Order — Power Corruption and Lies, The Rolling Stones — Let It Bleed, The Clash — London Calling, Mike Oldfield — Tubular Bells, Led Zeppelin — IV, Primal Scream — Screamadelica and David Bowie — The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.

The ten stamps in the Classic Record Cover series.

However, also included in the booklet were two mini sheets of ordinary definitive stamps (i.e. standard stamps bearing only the Queen’s head). One of these had a Banksy connection.

The mini sheet from the Classic Record Covers booklet with Banksy’s Diver with Bird.

So I rekindlled my stamp-collecting and added these to my Banksy collection.