Stamp your foot and other things

For some reason blogger is all fucky and going s o s l o w l y
But here i am, suffering, all because of my love of inky things, in particular, inky-stampy things.
So look! These rubber stamps are just beautiful. The way all stamps should be.





Rubber was discovered in the Amazon River Basin by a French explorer in 1736. Three decades later the idea of using small cubes of it to erase pencil marks was hatched, but as rubber was still a novelty- expensive and hard to come by, most people kept using bread crumbs for that task, just as they always had.


The problem at that time, was that rubber would quickly turn goop if the temperature rose. Luckily, an eccentric inventor named Charles Goodyear became obsessed with the dilemma. He quit his hardware business and stormed his wife's kitchen, turning it into a makeshift lab for his wild rubber experiments. Poor Charles lost precious moments however, when his unpaid debts and recurring bankruptcy led to sporadic imprisonment. At one point, Charles sold his children's school books to pay for his next experiment. Fortunately, a clumsy moment in the kitchen led to a major revelation, when he accidentally spilled some rubber mixed with sulphur on his wife's hot stove. Voila! It maintained it properties, and the next day, was still flexible.
Charles had done it.


It was 1860 and the Civil War saw rubber stamps come into everyday use, an efficient way to authorize all those piles of important papers quickly. Slowly stamps became incorporated into the art world, first by the Russian futurists and then by the German Dadaists. In the 60s-70s stamps had their pop-culture heyday, becoming the old-fashioned equivalent to Game Boy.




Do you have a favourite? Do you care at all?