album · page xli · unmarked frankings
no denomination · ca. 1880–1932 · printed by no one in particular
not exactly a stamp. a franking — a small printed rectangle used by an archive to mark its own outgoing letters, which travelled by official courier and paid no postage. the archive's mark passes through the post without being post. the country, in any sense, is the archive itself.
the vignette is absent on purpose. an archive shows no faces, no lighthouses, no ships. the rectangle is kept clean so the cancellation, when it comes, has somewhere to settle. the impression you see here is the smallest of three known house-marks, pressed in oil-black ink at the moment of dispatch.
these frankings turn up in great quantity on the inside flaps of letters dating from the long quiet years between two wars. the archive itself burned in 1944. the frankings on letters sent earlier are now the only object that proves the archive ever knew what it knew.
field-note · the franking has no perforations strictly speaking — the edges were printed with the suggestion of them.
see also · blanket stamp · old noem · 1d red · the library · the catalogue · palimpsest