I Wonder If They Taste Older, Too.
February 4th, 2008 @ 4:52 pm by Mrs. Lovebug
Ignore the timestamp on this post. Because it was written at three a.m., and you need to know that, in order to fully comprehend what a psycho I am. I have spent the past three hours going blind over a glaring laptop screen, scrolling a ginormous PDF catalog of vintage stamps from Champion Stamp Co.
I know. They’re stamps. They’ll be thrown away. I ought to be locked up for putting so much time into this. I can’t stop italicizing.
At any rate (puns always intended), here are the stamps I’ve lost 5% of my vision for.
I think they’ll look pretty on our square, white envelopes with slate grey calligraphy (à la our save-the-dates). It’s definitely an indulgence (not to mention an arsepain, what with calculating out all the variable denominations), but I’ve had my heart set on vintage stamps since the get-go, so I made sure to budget for them.
The lineup:
Grace Kelly: A nod to Mr. LB’s acting, an oblique reference to my favorite Hitchcock film (Rear Window), and a SUPER OBLIQUE reference to an Eels song I love.
Melville: SUPER OBLIQUE reference to Bartleby’s Dead Letter Office, a concept which fascinates us.
Shakespeare: We love Billy.
Tom Sawyer: Oddly enough, I once played Tom Sawyer in a kid’s play. 2nd favorite boy character of all time, after Harry.
And for our reply cards, pithy poet - and one of my personal literary heros - Ogden Nash:
(…and some other four cent stamp TBD.)
Nash is known for precisely the sort of whimsical wordplay and creative rhyming that I love:
A girl who is bespectacled
She may not get her nectacled
But safety pins and bassinets
Await the girl who fassinets.
That, combined with the typewriter font background, make it pretty much the perfect stamp to reflect our theme. Incidentally, the Nash stamp is also the first U.S. Stamp to contain the word “sex” in it, somewhere between the big “O” and “fertile”. Somebody had fun with that one.
Anyone else tackling the vintage stamp beast? If so, are you choosing stamps based on colors? Design? Significance?
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19 Responses to “I Wonder If They Taste Older, Too.”
I’m going the vintage stamp route, via Ebay. But a lot of mine are SO vintage that they’re, like, 1 or 2 cent denominations…. And with square envelopes to boot, I’m afraid the whole front of the envelope will be covered with stamps by the time we’re done!!!
(And now the USPS has gone and issued a Chinese lantern stamp, which would be perfect for our Asian-lantern-heavy wedding. But it’s too late — vintage stamps already purchased! Oh well….)
ChicagoSarah: there’s tons! Carl Sandberg, Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Thoreau…
we are stamp overthinkers as well… altho we used the “forever” stamp, with the liberty bell. of course we’re from philly & having the wedding here a block from the liberty bell, besides just the together “forever” thing. we also took our “stds” to the B Free post office, the only one in the country where they still handstamp everything with a little guy that still looks like this:
http://www.knottywood-treasures.com/pictures/ca691b.jpg
we were so excited by this. everyone else- not so much. oh well!
i didn’t touch the creative stamp front, but i had to mention that we did have an Ogden Nash poem as one of our ceremony readings. “I Do, I Will, I Have”
Love it!
i love vintage stamps! i collected them as a kid. unfortunately, i won’t be using them for the wedding since it’s not very cost efficient with the # of invites we have. love the ogden nash find!
Do do do the vintage stamps (we did), and we got so many compliments… I must tell you it is a bit more work than the standard sticker stamp of today, but it brings so much more character to your invites…
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v720/karcowel/stampblock.jpg
that is a picture of the various stamps we hunted and bought on-line to adorn our square envelopes… Believe it or not it is hard to get the quantity you need to have them all match. We had 85 complete invitations
We mixed old with new using the more recent pink heart stamp to come up with the bulk of the $0.79 these took to mail, and then we were able to pick up the difference with (2) california stamps, one love stamp, and one music recording stamp… all the things that mean the most to us 
I used “vintage” stamps. Not sure you can call them that, they were from when stamps were .29 cents and .33 cents. I used 2 from tropical flowers collection for my outer envelopes (.33cent) (they came in squares of 4, so 2 formed 1/2 a picture) and and some scuba/tropical flowers .29cent ones for the RSVP postcards.
Some people did notice, and I had a VERY small guest list, so I’m glad I did it!
Ok, so I didn’t give much thought to stamps for our STDs. There were two options at the post office that day: hearts or a very lovely commemorative stamp of a Tiffany stain glass window that happened to look perfect on our ecru envelopes. Sold! STDs sent and received.
BUT THEN, I look online to buy more and discover — ack! — the stain glass window is a MEMORIAL window that’s in a New Jersey cemetary! The stamp is about DEATH and I’ve used it on our wedding stationary.
I’m now giving considerable thought to stamps for our invitations.
I have sheets of the Grace Kelly Stamp that I bought when it was released by the post office in 1993.
What we’re doing is the hand cancelation stamp for some of our STD’s that we waited to send until now from the post office in Loveland, CO. It reads:
From mountains high
To lakesides blue
This heart’s from Loveland
Dear One, to you
and the stamp is cancelled with “Loveland, CO”
Anyone anywhere in the US can get them to hand cancel their mail as long as it’s before Valentines day. We have drop boxes here in Colorado in the grocery stores. But if you’re out of state, all you have to do is mail your original letter to them with the mail intending to be cancelled inside and they will remail.
Here’s a link for more info
http://www.9news.com/life/programming/shows/mornings/article.aspx?storyid=85579
I love love love vintage stamps and would be so happy to have some on my beautiful invitations, but unfortunately I can’t seem to find any canadian stamps.
All this websites are American… where is the neighbourly love at??? I think they’re gorgeous!
I was just going to buy them from Greer in Chicago, I didn’t know there were other sources! I will for sho doing vintage stamps. Anything else would look out of place on our invites (at least, that is what I have convinced myself 
Grace Kelly was also a stunning bride.
I COMPLETELY feel you on this! And will gladly stand next to all of you in the overindulgent stamp club!
Karianne - wow. 79 cents? For realz? Good to know, thanks.
Mrs. Daisy - awesome! I haven’t started thinking out readings, but I think Nash would be so fresh and unexpected.
July: I love the idea of the Loveland stamp. That’s so sweet and shows so much thought.
Miss Peacock: have fun going blind with that PDF! J/K. There are other companies; I just like how Champion has everything in one place.
Flamingo: I’m SURE you can find cool Canadian stamps…this sounds like a mission you’ve been entrusted with.
Rear Window is my favorite film of all time! These envelopes are going to be gorgeous.
As far as the 0.79 price tag is concerned, we had used very heavyweight print press paper and our invitations had several components… It all fit nicely into the square envelopes, but they were heavy. You might luck out and get a little chaper than our 0.79, but you wont get a square envelope mailed for 0.42 - Good luck
p.s. some of the older stamps do taste funny
I am also crazy with using different stamps - however at 250 invitations - I am really running out of options. I must have bought every magnolia stamp out there - as well as many others. It is definitely not cost efficient - however it is so much fun and hopefully others will appreciate it as well!
[...] piles of “past-prime” postage? Rate/size complications have caused us to tweak our original stamp plan somewhat (we’ll no doubt tweak it again), but I really hope we can find a way to include [...]
Mrs. Lovebug, Tucson
Age and Occupation in 06: 31, Writer
Fiance's Age and Occupation: 27, Professional Game Show Contestant
Engagement Date: February 18, 2007
Wedding Date: April 19, 2008
Venue: Historic Inn
About Me: Likes: blogging, wikis, semi-colons, cuddling, fragrant flowers, syntax, and spooning. Dislikes: typos, dangling modifiers, flypaper, citronella candles, and run-ons. If I had my druthers, I'd exchange simple vows in a candlelit library. But I lost my druthers long ago...anyone seen them?
Oh, Miss Lovebug, I had no idea that these existed! Now I want some! Why spend excessive $$ on Zazzle stamps when we could spend excessive $$ on VINTAGE stamps?!
We would go with authors for sure since our wedding will be at a library and we’re thinking of using book titles or favorite quotations for our table names. I think I need to just. back. away. (figuratively) from that stamp catalog…but I’m so curious what other authors are available!