My uncle used to be a big stamp collector (as was I, briefly). Besides showing me the interesting “legitimate” stamps in his collection, he showed me what he (and other philatelists) called “black blots” – stamps that were not really intended to be put on letters, but which were made specifically to be sold to stamp collectors, to generate income for the country. Bhutan used to be (still is?) big on this, with stamps printed on steel foil, or lenticular 3-D stamps of current events, or stamps printed with cartoon characters, or the like. The kind of thing that a 13 year old kid would go far, and which looked far more interesting than trying to obtain a complete set of all 50 facial expressions of Adolph Hitler from watrtime German stamps.
I’ve got three questions about this:
1.) Did any of these oddball stamps actually get used on letters mailed from Bhutan (or wherever)?
2.) If not, then what did the stamps they actually used look like?
3.) Over time, even kitschy, made-for collecting things eventually develop a perverse folllowing of their own. It seems to me likely that, after enough timer passes, people will begin collecting these things and valuing them precisely because they were intentionally made as “collector’s items” . Has this, in fact, happened?