The Language Of Stamps
Citing a 90% drop in postal volumes since 2000, the Danish state-run postal service, PostNord, announced that it will end all letter deliveries at the end of 2025. Here in the UK letter volumes fell in 2023/24 to 6.6 billion, down 9% from the previous year, and almost a half of the 11.922 billion delivered in 2017. With the advent of the telephone and then email and other forms of near instant communication, the postal service has rather fallen a victim of technological advances, used now to send birthday and Christmas greetings, bulky objects, official documents and little else.
Nevertheless, there is still a bit of a ritual to sending a letter, not least the positioning of the stamp. Convention and indeed Post Office advice insists that the stamp be positioned in the top right-hand corner of the letter, clearly visible, not bent over and edge, and on the same side as the address. As most stamps these days have barcodes, stamps should be flat to ensure that they are easy to scan.
Within those protocols the precise positioning of the stamp can give the recipient of the letter an insight into the mindset of the sender. A stamp that is skewed can be indicative of someone who is slapdash or in a hurry while one perfectly positioned is suggestive of someone who is precise, calm and collected. However, going back a century or more when social conventions were designed to repress true feelings, the position of a stamp on an envelope could reveal much more.
Rather like the positioning of fans and the choice of flowers in a bouquet to convey a message, so the precise placement of a postage stamp could add hidden meaning to a seemingly innocuous message. One of the earliest references to the practice, giving the reader an insight into what each of the positions meant, appeared in a Hungarian weekly journal, Szarvas és vidéke, on July 13, 1890.
“For all those who are in the situation of Hero and Leander”, it disclosed, “and similarly to them can only exchange secret signs about the feelings of their hearts, here we publish the secrets of the language of stamps. If the stamp stands upright in the upper right corner of the card or envelope, it means: I wish your friendship. Top right, across: Do you love me? Top right, upside down: Don’t write to me anymore. Top right, thwart: Write to me immediately. Top right, upright: Your love makes me happy. Top left, across: My heart belongs to someone else. Top left, upright: I love you. Bottom left, across: Leave me alone in my grief. In line with the name: Accept my love. Same place, across: I wish to see you. Same place, upside down: I love someone else”.
“We hope”, the article concluded, “that besides the inventor of the “new language” there would be other persons too who would eventually use it”. The writer’s aspirations were not misplaced, and by the turn of the 20th century, with the growth in the use of postcards, there are examples of this form of secret communication being explained and promoted in many European countries, including Britain.
Etiquette manuals began to include chapters on the subject and postcards were printed with a beginner’s guide showing the positions of stamps and the messages they conveyed. Most systems used six positions – the top right or left corner of the envelope, the bottom left or right corner, and centrally to the left or right of the recipient’s surname.
Many examples of those that have survived in the collections of deltiologists have the actual stamp used to post them affixed at a jaunty angle, suggesting that the sender selected this particular form of card to ensure that their message did not escape the attention of the recipient. While this move seemed somewhat self-defeating, it did remove the need to learn by heart the positions as detailed in a manual.
