One of my hobbies is stamp collecting.
I find it relaxing, informative, and fun. Naturally, I try to tie my other hobbies into my stamp collecting habits, so being an Eagle scout, I have a collection of Scouts on Stamps. As a judo black belt, I have a collection of stamps depicting judo.
And the list goes on.
Stamp Collecting Mysteries
One of the areas I’ve been working on with my collection is obtaining stamps or covers that depict fictional detectives.
As a general rule, when I collect stamps from literature, I try not to obtain stamps that depict movie versions of books. There are a lot of Lord of the Rings stamps that have Orlando Bloom as Legolas on them.
The detective stamps are fun.
There are tons of stamps centered around Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s and Dame Agatha Christie’s creations. You could actually put together a decent collection centered around one or both of those authors and their creations.
But the broader opportunities in stamp collecting are out there. Edgar Allen Poe, Auguste Dupin, Nero Wolfe, Inspector Maigret, Sam Spade, Phillip Morrow, and more grace stamps from around the world … and these are the literature versions.
Add in stamps depicting fictional detectives from television and film, and you can expand to quite a large collection.
If this interests you, a pretty good list updated through stamps issued in 2017 is available at this link.
The horror of stamp collecting
I also collect “horror on stamps.” Again, I try generally to avoid television and film, but find it harder with this topic.
It is broad. There are whole collections on just Dracula, vampires, or Bram Stoker. You can also find entire collections centered around Halloween. Quite a few Frankenstein stamps are out there, too.
But again, the bulk of stamps in horror are movie centric.
It all depends on how you define horror, really. But again, it is a topic you can have a lot of fun with.
Let me also say that there is a very large topical community that collect fantasy, science fiction, and fairy tale related stamps. These are not areas of interest to me, but they can certainly make a nice collection too.
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