My Little Book of Stamps: a humorous look at stamp collecting

https://www.foyles.co.uk/book/my-little-book-of-stamps/conor-biggs/9781915229274

During Covid I decided to write a book about my hobby, stamp collecting. Based around four hundred or so stamps from my own collection, I wrote a short essay for each stamp, giving some idea of the social and historical context as well as penning witty doggerel. For Chile, for instance, I wrote

                                                            Longest country in the world,
                                                        Thinnish, true, but quite uncurled.

Despite the title of the book, the underlying message is serious, since many of the stamps date from the colonial period, and as such helped prop up the iniquities of the colonizing country, since regimes are very dependent on reliable systems of communication. The paternalistic attitude to countries in far way Africa or Asia was nourished by such egregious notions as 'the white man's burden' fostered by Kipling and his contemporaries, notably Cecil Rhodes and Baden-Powell. I describe how the founder of the Scout Movement was violently homophobic, and loved watching executions; how Belgian's King Leopold II sanctioned unspeakable cruelty in his private fiefdom in the Congo; how the initial philanthropy of Pierre de Brazzaville in today's Congo (Brazzaville) was betrayed by cynical business consortia; how the Italians practised ethnic cleansing in Libya in the 1930s, without the slightest compunction, how the British sided with the Turks in Cyprus, leaving a legacy of bitterness still felt today, how the Dutch practised apartheid in today's Indonesia and how Robert Koch, lionized today for having discovered the TB bacillus, also administered arsenic to the native population of German East Africa in a bid to find a cure for sleeping sickness.

My Little Book of Stamps is aimed at the general reader, and seeks to demystify a hobby which is often seen as being for fuddy duddies.

The book is available as print-on-demand (on-line only) from many retail outlets such as Foyles, Waterstones, Strand books (US)

https://www.foyles.co.uk/book/my-little-book-of-stamps/conor-biggs/9781915229274

https://www.strandbooks.com/my-little-book-of-stamps-9781915229274.html

https://www.waterstones.com/book/my-little-book-of-stamps/conor-biggs/9781915229274

...as well as the ubiquitous Amazon.

Since pictures (and sounds) speak louder than words, the following links will provide a witty introduction to my tome:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFOGRsQB_-Q

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlacEIIn23Y

And this radio interview (click on 'download'):

https://www.talkradioeurope.com/conor-biggs-my-little-book-of-stamps-a-humorous-look-at-stamp-collecting-with-tres-giles-brown/