The Hello Kitty stamps and set of emergency vehicles each came in a
small plastic carrying case which included stamp pads and stickers or
tiny postcards, they were made by Sanrio in Japan. The emergency
vehicles set was bought from Selfridges, Oxford St for £5.00 in 1993.
These two were bought on a trip to the supermarket in Baltimore
specifically to check out cereal toys during one of my early trips to the
USA. Both are merchandised characters - a Boglin and the Flintstones
pet dinosaur who came in a packet of Fruit Loops. They both came
with ink pads, much better toys/premiums than the ones which we got
in the UK. I didn't eat the cereal.
Another dinosaur, a Transformer which doesn't actually transform,
but does have rubber stamps cleverly concealed in his neck, tail & back
legs and a blue ink pad on his back! 14cm from nose to tail. A first
generation Transformer made by Hasbro in 1985 bought from the Wood
Green Toys'r'Us store, North London, back in the days when Toys'r'Us
still had odd, quirky imported american toys that you never saw
anywhere else. There's one currently for sale via eBay for US $135.00
Beautifully packaged, so I kept them just as they were, and showed
them in the book by including several photocopied pages.The Japanese
hiragana writing system stamp set was sent by Citizen X, who was
working in Japan at the time and wrote an explanation of each character
on the reverse. The Money Maker Stamp Set, made in Hong Kong
would have been produced in versions sold in different countries, with
the appropriate currency symbol printed on the blank banknotes. And
why limit yourself to just printing £100 notes - it would be easy to alter
the stamps and print £10,000 notes? Interestingly both sets have images
of a boy and girl on the packaging - they were sold as unisex toys and I
particularly like the image of the boy printing a stack of banknotes and
girl joyfully getting rid of them.
Individual letters cut from unwanted stamps with a razor sharp
scalpel blade and reassembled to create new phrases and texts.
Ransom note stylee, quick and cheap.
The barbed wire and flowers were salvaged by my Dad together with
several trays of wooden poster printing type and some metal advertising
blocks, from a disused printers premises in Warrington, Cheshire that
was due for demolition. It's tough on the hands to stamp with these.
From family heirlooms to those made last month, everything's here. Meticulously
stamped by hand and divided into classified sections; bought new, secondhand, gifts
trades & swaps, etc, and a full-colour section. Red ink throughout, turquoise for the titles.
The first copies of this book were made in back 1994-1995, and now, finally,
I've printed all the pages necessary to update and complete the edition!
21x15cm, 250 copies, 80pgs, perfectbound paperback, 2023.
stamp sheet September 1984
stamp sheet 1985
stamp sheet January 1986
