Fun with Fractal Postage Stamps
A rare 1918 postage stamp belonging to a sheet of misprints fetched a record setting $525,000 at auction. Not bad for a 24¢ stamp of an upside down airplane. Since it was a mistake that made this stamp so unique, it got me thinking.. What if you could make a series of stamps where every single one was unique and slightly different?
Canada Post now lets you make your own stamps with Picture Postage™ where you can simply upload a photo and print out a sheet of custom stamps. Cool, now imagine if the post office were to take that a step further. Perhaps by printing computer generated fractals on every single stamp?
I know, you’re saying, “Now if they’re all unique what’s the fun in that? None of them will fetch half a million at auction!” However, what might spike the interest for stamp collectors is if by design, two of the stamps were purposely the same. Out a run of a few thousand completely unique stamps, two of them could be an exact match! Of course, having a nice web 2.0 application to help collectors compare their stamps with other collectors would really help this process. By the way, fractal stamps don’t have to look like your traditional Mandelbrot set, the images could also look like snowflakes.
These wonderful snowflake images were taken by Kenneth G. Libbrecht for the United States Postal Service. If you’re interested, be sure to checkout the incredible detail of these US Commemorative Snowflake Stamps.
Is the Post office working on this now? I can’t wait!!
I have a small stamp collection and I think this will be awesome! Do we have to scan in each stamp or will the stamps include a code to enter to pull up the image online? I hope they have more than a single match, there should be multiple matches distributed across the country.
Hey Crickey,
As far as I know, this is a new idea. I hope they consider it.
If anyone from the postal services (from any country) is interested in doing this, I’d be happy to help design the web application to support this service.
j