Elvis On Stamps

With enough postage stamps on it we received the book “Elvis On Stamps” {1978~2003} from the author Nitaya Kanchanawan from Thailand. If our memory serves us correctly, this is the first book on Elvis stamps.

Design

The book looks like a package on the outside, with the wrinkled brown paper, stamps (Elvis stamps of course) and a “Return To Sender” stamp on it. The pages inside look like the old fashioned airmail envelopes with the red and blue border. The different images are all presented in good quality on high quality paper. All information is in Thai, but the country names and dates are in English.

Content

Since the book is written in the Thai language we browsed through it like a picture book, and it surely holds a lot of interesting images. Of course most of us are very familiar with the US Postal stamp which sold over half a billion copies, but a lot of countries worldwide released their own Elvis stamp. We guess a lot of countries in Africa, the Eastern Pacific an Eastern Europe tried to import foreign currencies this way.

This book lists probably all Elvis stamps released in the 25 years after Elvis’ death. Besides the stamps there are quite a few “First Day Of Issue” envelopes shown in the book too, listed country by country in alphabetical order. If our Thai is good enough it looks like each stamp is listed chronologically and with additional information on the stamp itself. We say probably complete since we have a few Elvis stamps ourselves, and did not find them in the book.

We see a lot of images we know and some new and very strange ones, both with and without the “Official EPE Product” symbol. The images used for the specific stamps are both photos and drawings of Elvis from all eras of his life, from the child to the adult a few months before his untimely death.
Elvis is shown with a lot of celebrities from the musical world (Lennon and Marilyn Monroe of course), artists (Da Vinci and van Gogh), politicians (Nixon and Clinton), scientists (Einstein), Royalty (Queen Elizabeth, Princes Diana and the King and Queen of Thailand of course), Sportsmen and even Marten Luther King and the Pope. Lisa Marie Presley also has her own stamps (with Michael Jackson).

The strangest images we found were from Benin, celebrating the 75th Birthday of Mickey Mouse which does not show Mickey Mouse, but a cat on the stamp and Walt Disney back to back with Elvis on the presentation sheet surrounding the stamp.

Conclusion

Overall a very interesting book describing part of the Elvis world that had not been documented yet. This book is worth being translated into English, to get all details on the many original stamps shown in this book.