The curious tale of Bhutan's playable record postage stamps (2015)
thevinylfactory.com120 points by ohjeez 3 days ago
120 points by ohjeez 3 days ago
"Issued in 1972 in a set of seven, the stamps are miniature, one-sided, 33 1⁄3 rpm vinyl records playable on a standard turntable. You peeled off the backing paper and stuck them on an envelope or postcard. Content includes Bhutanese folk songs and histories of the country in English and Dzongkha, the local language. "
I work in IT. I used to be a philatelist (can you stop?). How on earth did I never think of this.
It makes those bloody awful business card CDs (off of the 90s n noughties) look pretty naff.
Barking mad and quite beautiful. Love it!
Given the timelines and lead times for production, I assume this was conceptualized on a mid-1960s acid trip.
People can have a lot of imagination.
With or without any chemical encouragement :)
When acid got popular and was not the least bit unlawful or anything, tons of people never imagined there could be life-changing legal issues someday.
All it needs is a stamp that is a flip-out groove player, you just put one of the other stamps on it, blow, and listen ..
In the 70s and early 80s you might get a record like this made of flimsy plastic as a toy in a cereal box, or as a happy meal toy, etc. never heard of postage stamps but seems like a similar use case.
I remember getting computer magazines for birthday presents in the 70's/80's, which you could play into your computer from Dad's record player and load up a few of the type-ins .. I had a small suite of them, as well as some music variants. They were fun, but I transferred most of the interesting stuff to cassette tape, anyway.
These Bhutan stamps are delightful, and inspire me to learn more about the country. I hope there might be the prospect of future new releases, this is a kind of thing I could really get into.
A fun thought-game is to construct a small player stamp, onto which you drop a content stamp, blow a little, and hear the results .. I once knew a guy whose business-card could be used to play a record, barely audible, but still ..
Previous discussion:
The curious tale of Bhutan's playable record postage stamps (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22896682 - April 2020 (30 comments)
Does anyone know how large these stamps are? (I didn't see any dimensions in the article.)
I don't own any, but https://www.megaministore.com/stamps/asia/bhutan-stamps/bhut... lists the sizes as 69mm and 100mm. I suppose that would be the diameter, not radius. Either way, pretty big, I'd say.
Now I wonder if these were ever really used as actual postage stamps? Besides the size and weight, stamps need to be "cancelled" by, well, stamping them with another kind of stamp (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancellation_(mail)) before an envelope goes in the mail, and I can't imagine how that would work with these...
EDIT: there are also first day covers using these stamps available (https://boingboing.net/2022/07/07/look-at-these-cool-1970s-p...), and the photo shows that it actually works, but not really well, especially with the black one...
Pretty big for a stamp, but pretty small for a record.
I polled a couple of AIs real quicklike. They're telling me that the label dimensions for vinyl records range from 75-100mm.
That means that these stamps were no larger than the label on a typical record you'd put on a turntable. That would make them nigh-unplayable in modern systems.
In modern turntables, each tonearm has a limiter that prevents them from straying past the runout grooves. The runout grooves are designed to signal the end of media. Typically you'll have some wide spacing and then the spiral ends in a completely circular track.
Older turntables would just sit in the runout grooves and play silence. You could risk damage to the needle or mechanism if the needle accidentally hit paper or the arm hit the spindle. Better-designed turntables would sense this, usually based on distance, lift/return the tonearm mechanically, and stop the playback.
So the only turntables which can "play" these "stamps" would be ones which ignore that minimum size requirement. Perhaps some really high-end systems have a disabling switch, but consumer-grade ones sure didn't, in my recollection.
In case you’re curious how they sound:
I searched @Techmoan’s channel for coverage first, because he seems exactly like a bloke who’d be interested in doing 40 minutes documenting these.
Just from eyeballing the video you linked, I would worry that the playing surface is so small, a normal turntable would refuse to play. An override may be required, because most tonearms would sense the runoff grooves or label boundary simply by distance from the center spindle.
The stamps look barely wider than a standard record’s label.
Interesting! Now I'm wondering if Leighton or Feynman was aware of these stamps (my ddg/google-fu is bad today).
I find it fascinating that something so inherently worthless like stamps can sell for such large sums. Old fashioned NFT's?
These stamps however are very cool. And the prices are actually reasonable.
As kids we collected pokemon cards. Even less inherent value and we didn't even really play the game well or certainly didn't know the proper rules.
Stamps are collectibles from all over the world, that keep/kept getting made with varied art, history, etc on it often having interesting factoids to know about em, etc And with some effort if you were writing letters and postcards anyway you got them for free (with some stamp lines on em from time to time)
>worthless like stamps
Stamps used to be almost like money. I have payed for stuff with stamps.
> inherently worthless
There are many things that different people places different value on. The things I don’t place value on aren’t inherently worthless.
Sure stamps are collectible, and have some value, but at the end of the day it should be within reason. At the end of the day stamps are simply brightly coloured bits of paper, and their price should reflect that. Some of the more expensive stamps go for hundreds of thousands of dollars, even millions, which goes so far beyond what is reasonable that the only logical explanation is that the buyers are paying purely for status. Which makes them no different from NFT's.