XANTHE'S
STAMP MAGAZINE

There has been a lot of talk about Royal Mail increasing the cost of a First Class stamp to £1.80 from 7th April. Most people think this is too high, and I agree as the jump in price isn't going to persuade many people to write more letters. I get the "cycle" argument - people are using digital communication more, which means there are fewer letters to deliver, which means that the price needs to go up to deliver fewer letters to more addresses, which means that fewer people

Royal Mail's fifth issue of the year will be released on 20th March and celebrates The Lord of the Rings . It's 25 years since the first LOTR film, The Fellowship of the Ring , hit UK cinemas. I believe that, at the time, this was a sensational film that exceeded many people's expectations. It took the fantasy adventures from JRR Tolkien's famous novel and turned it into a gripping film, with believable battle scenes and probably the first realistic digitally-created charact

I was at a stamp fair in Liverpool a few weeks ago. I was looking for something a bit different and I came across these old stamps. I hadn't seen anything like them before and I thought it would be good to buy them and do some research on them later. The first question is: what is a revenue stamp? They are stamps that were not used for postage. Instead, they were issued by "a government to certify that a tax, fee, or duty has been paid on goods or documents". So basically th