Tuvalu: The Archipelago That Sold Its Stamps

Tuvalu is a small archipelago in Polynesia. Its population, just over 10,000 inhabitants, doesn't generate any significant economic activity, and despite the fact that its islands risk being completely submerged by the ocean due to rising sea levels, it's said to be likely the happiest country in the world.

But by Western standards, laughter doesn't pay the bills, so that doesn't make a difference when it comes to ranking it as one of the poorest countries on the planet. Its GDP is just over 30 million dollars. Many football signings are worth more than that.

In this context, the Tuvaluan Prime Minister started thinking about how to make extra money out of thin air. They didn't produce any goods in large quantities, but at the end of the day they were a country and that counts: they must have had something unique that could be exported.

And that unique thing found its foothold in the country's rarity. They realized there were no Tuvalu stamps in the stamp collector's market, precisely a market plagued with hunters of rarities who would pay a high price to have stamps issued by a practically unknown country in their hands.

And so it was that in the late seventies Tuvalu authorized the printing of thousands of stamps. Since there was no printing press in Tuvalu, an English partner appeared (who is said to have ended up having total control over the archipelago's stamp issuance) who took care of the printing.

Whether by initiative of the islands' rulers or the shady English partner, someone got so excited about this "golden goose" that things got out of hand. Soon they were already issuing editions of stamps on different themes. For example, a famous (and beautiful) collectible edition of locomotive stamps, in a country that didn't know what a locomotive was. These curiosities catapulted sales in the collector's circle until one day, blinded by the money that was pouring in, they had the bad idea of crossing the thin line of what's right and began deliberately introducing errors into the prints, as they realized that stamps with errors had high value... and in this way some letters were printed in the wrong place, others upside down, some backwards, and so on, they invented as many errors as they could until the market became saturated with fake errors.

Close to 14,000 deliberate errors were introduced and as always happens in shady businesses, Tuvalu's partner (the Englishman Clive Feigenbaum) wanted more money than agreed upon and ended up opening a case against the archipelago in English courts.

This whole business of selling stamps became an important source of income for the islands. A business that has currently been reduced to very little or almost nothing. Over the course of almost 3 decades of postal stamps, everything was produced, irrelevant stamps, of poor quality, but also authentic works of art like those included in the Locomotive Philatelica collection, dedicated to locomotives from around the world and which the English magnate made in partnership with several exotic islands and almost unknown places.

So the reader doesn't remain curious about what these collections looked like, I'll share some photographs.