175th anniversary of the Penny Black stamp

Before 1st May 1840, posting a letter was a very complicated and expensive affair. It could cost the equivalent of a days wage, and it was charged by how many sheets of paper were used and how far it had to travel. Normally the recipient had to pay the cost.

Sir Roland Hill was responsible for reforming the British postal system, and as part of this a competition was held for the public to design the world’s first adhesive postage stamp. However none of the entries were thought suitable, so instead they used the profile sketch of a then 15 year old Queen Victoria. This image was used on stamps until the end of her reign. Because the Penny Black was the first postage stamp in the world, it did not show a country of origin, and to this day British stamps are the only stamps in the world that do not state what country they are from.

However, the Penny Black only remained in circulation for a year, as it was soon found that it was possible to remove the ink of the red cancellation mark and re-use the stamp, so the Treasury switched to the Penny Red and black cancellation ink.

I asked Kevin, the artist on the project a few burning questions:

Where are the classic microperforated edges normally seen on stamps?

When creating doodles, there is often a balance between artistic license and historical integrity. The iconic image of a stamp, at least today, is that of a small rectilinear bit of paper with the classic saw-tooth perforations along the perimeter. These perforations, however, were a later invention and the Penny Black came in sheets that had to be subdivided by the scissor or knife. I decided to keep this detail in the final doodle, and depicted the Penny Black stamp with classic imperforate edges.

How did the sheet get so conveniently faded?

This was, conversely, a case of artistic license. The original Penny Black stamps were, as the name suggests, blacker than a moonless night. In order to create a silhouette of the Google logo, I made some of the stamps lighter than the others.

Did you copy the faces or did you draw them each separately?

Each portrait was drawn individually. I came to be quite familiar with the Her Majesty Queen Victoria's profile!