Friday, May 11, 2012

TRADING STAMP SAVER BOOKS

FLEA MARKET FRIDAYS #69


Remember trading stamp saver books that you could get from the local supermarket? 

I have fond memories of helping my grandma fill out these books. Instead of licking, we had bowls of water and wet sponges to moisten the stamps. I felt like this was such an important responsibility that she trusted me with. I would try and do my best and place the stamps as straight in the book as I could. Once we filled out the books, we would spend hours looking through a catalog deciding what to trade our stamp filled books for. Oh boy, a new coffee pot! Something that sounds archaic now, but it sure was fun Saturday afternoon.

Recently I picked up a bag of stamp books at an antique shop. They're from the 1950s and 60s.  




Besides the fun covers, these books are filled with cool mid-century illustrations. Here's a sampling below. For more illustrations, check out my stamp saver set on flickr.  









2 comments:

Lady Jaye said...

Interesting to see what those stamp books looked like! Are you familiar with the French-Canadian play "The Guid Sisters" by Michel Tremblay ("Les belles-soeurs" in its original version)? It's a tragicomic story about a working-class woman who wins a million stamps from a store and enlists her neighbors and family to help her stick them all in the stamp books. Of course, jealousy and pettiness follows, and the stamp party doesn't occur as peacefully as planned. The original play was controversial upon its creation in the 1960s due to its use of French-Canadian slang instead of textbook-perfect French and is now a classic.

Paul Duca said...

Still sounds more dramatic than the Brady kids building a house of cards to see who gets the 94 books of stamps.