First Class

the long version

This delightfully playful history uses 36 of our most expressive, quriky, beautiful and sometimes baffling stamps to tell us the story of Britain, through Dickens and the potato famine to Thatcher and punk. Stamps tell a story. Since the Penny Black first burst on the scene in 1840, they have made and mirrored history as it happens - from the "Britsh Empire Exhibition" of 1924 to the Austerity Olympics of 1948, from the Coronation to the death of Diana, from the advent of computers to the new Millennium. Chris West is a stamp-obsessive. He has picked his favourites to tell a hugely entertaining and idiosyncratic history.