On a recent episode of his Discovery Channel travel/food show, NO RESERVATIONS, celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain referred to himself as “a total egg slut” – meaning he loves eggs, he would do almost anything to have them, possess them, devour them.  While I’m not hep to that step (I like eggs okay, but mostly dressed as pancakes) I can dig it, the slut part anyway.  I’m a total monster slut and a postage stamp slut to boot.  I collected the latter as a kid, kept an album for a while, but didn’t stay with the passion of philately; as for the former, by now you should be all too familiar with my tastes.  Monsters are a part of my life, woven into the fabric, dyed in the wool.  But when monsters appear on postage stamps… toss me a harp and call it Heaven.

When the set of stamps pictured above was issued by the United States Postal Service in time for Halloween 1997, I was Johnny Alucard on the Spot.  I remember while standing in line at a branch of the USPS on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, a TV monitor hung above the queue was running FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLFMAN (1943) – how cool is that?!  (Rhetorical question: very cool.)  I bought lots of those stamps to send out my bills and holiday cards and niggling Letters to the Editor (back before I wrote for magazines and became the subject of niggling Letters to the Editor) and even bought a set that I never used – now that’s love for you.  There was also a big line of merchandise attached to the series (the postal service went all out, even reaching out to schools!), which replicated the design on computer mouse pads (like the one of THE WOLFMAN at my elbow), refrigerator magnets (check), postcards (check), pencils and erasers (check, check) and I can’t even tell you what else (checkitty-check-check-check).  I picked up a lot of these items after the stamps had been out a while and postage had gone up, making the merchandise obsolete (except to me).  It’s all preserved in a box in the closet, where the kids can’t get to it.  In order to get the cool Karloff stamp shown here on the left, you had to buy a flat of stamps devoted to various Hollywood concerns – this one depicts Universal monster maker Jack Pierce (unseen, but for his hands) making up Karloff the Uncanny for the original FRANKENSTEIN (1931).  It was a cool stamp, too, and I wish I kept one but for some reason I didn’t.

Classic Hollywood monsters have popped up as postage stamps in several foreign countries, proving the currency of these iconic figures around the world.  In the African Republic of Chad in 1998, Bela Lugosi’s DRACULA lorded over a 250 franc stamp; the following year saw the issue of a 450 franc stamp also bearing the eerie likeness of Lugosi’s cutaway Count.  In Sierra Leone, a set of 300 Le stamps boasting the image of Lugosi’s DRACULA, Charles Laughton’s Dr. Moreau from ISLAND OF LOST SOULS(1932), Elsa Lanchester’s BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935), Lon Chaney’s THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (1925), Fredric March as the worse half of DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (1931), Lon Chaney, Jr. as THE WOLFMAN (1941), Lionel Atwill in THE MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM (1933) and Boris Karloff in THE MUMMY (1932) among others were grouped under the heading of “Hollywood Horror Classics.”  In the United Kingdom in 1997, postal authorities took the high road in celebrating classic monsters by keeping the subjects of their postage stamps literary in a line the Royal Mail called Tales of Terror : Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein: Or the Modern Prometheus (although it was Frankenstein’s Monster who was depicted) and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s moors-set Sherlock Holmes Mystery The Hound of the Baskervilles.  In Ireland in 1997, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, an entire set of stamps was devoted to that deathless and influential character, although the illustrations were more than a little generic.  In 1998, Romania paid tribute to national hero Vlad Tepes, the purported inspiration for Count Dracula, with stamps celebrating The Impaler’s 500th birthday.

Although we Monster Lovers have had access (at least in theory) to a respectable supply of real monster stamps, we still dream of more.  In a perfect world, the imaginary stamps pictured to the left would be in circulation but they remain at the moment entirely the figments of the imagination of illustrator Adam McCauley.  What’s great about these pretend postage stamps is that they claim to hail from the very environs from which the individual bogeys were born: the Medusa of Athens, Greece; Frankenstein’s Monster’s actual hometown of Geneva, Switzerland; the Wales setting (I would kill for a Llanwelly stamp) of Universal’s THE WOLF MAN; the Tokyo, Japan, stamping grounds of GODZILLA; and Salem, Massachussetts for the delightfully generic witch.  These stamps just tickle me.  Though they are commonly called “Monster Stamps,” it should be noted that the San Francisco-based illustrator, graphic artist and author gave this piece the official title of The Monsterologist Endpaper Stamps as an entry in the Society of Illustrators annual exhibit in New York City in early February – it won a gold medal, and rightfully so.

I know, it’s all so silly, but to paraphrase Elizabeth Dunphy: “It’s the little things that matter, that add up in the end, with the priceless thrilling magic found only in a monster stamp.”

For additional information on fearsome philately, check out Fern Canyon Press for an overview of Dracula stamps and Frankensteiniafor Pierre Fournier’s informed take on “The Stamps of Frankenstein.”