Historical Floods--from Philatelic Records

Not very long ago, written communications were in the form of postal mail, like letters to your love, postcards to everyone else, and so on. The Universal Postal Union, established by the Treaty of Bern of 1874, agreed to and ratified by nearly all countries in the world, is an expeditious system of moving the mountains of mail coming and going, across the entire globe. One vital principle of that system was (and still is) proper postage. Initially, the postage stamps just depicted renditions of the ruler of the day, in different colors for the different postage rates. But, after a while, the postal services discovered that the little stamps could be made more meaningful by having pictures that were more relevant to the day. That's when philatelic exuberance got going. Many countries started to print postal stamps depicting all kinds of things, like birds, current events, inventions, plants, minerals, snails, you name it. And with that rapidly expanding variety of small pictures, a whole new genre of past time activity came about--collecting stamps.

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