Power & Philately: Myth-Making
With Miniature Works of Art
Part of the fragile framework holding together a country's mythos, postage stamps have long served as a form of propaganda.
This series, triumphantly titled Power & Philately: Myth-Making With Miniature Works of Art, appears about once a week with a new story. Each edition explores some facet of stamps or postal history as propaganda with commentary and interviews featuring relevant figures from around the world.
I’ll always bow to this supreme subject matter, but my application of the theme – philatelic propaganda – will remain fairly loose as I try to engage a more general readership. With philately as the backdrop, I’ll focus more on the political persuasions dictating our lives than the remarkable bits of paper used to facilitate global communication for more than a century. It’s a newsletter about history, politics, culture, sociology and art, all through the lens of stamps.
In addition to these weekly posts and depending on demand, I plan to launch a guest-focused podcast, educational courses and videos plus other multimedia content digging deeper into these topics.
Who knows what the future holds?
For now, P&P serves as a fun side project allowing me to use my journalism skills to provide the philatelic community with some rousing content—for free.
Subscribe & share
As the old saying goes, every stamp tells a story.
When you subscribe to Power & Philately, you receive an utterly luscious story in your inbox each week plus full access to the archive and Substack community. While no payment is ever necessary to access P&P, some righteous readers have opted to pay for donation subscriptions ($5 a month or $50 a year) or join the founding member plan as “esteemed financiers” ($100 a year), each of whom receives a special gift in the mail.
Whether you subscribe, share or donate, your support ensures this project’s survival. If no one’s reading it, I’ll stop writing it, and we’ll all move on to other schemes. But even a handful of readers – let alone a like or a share from one of them – would give me enough dopamine to render me chained to this damn keyboard for another sweet moment of fleeting happiness.
About the author
With engaging flair and a bit of panache, Canadian writer Jesse Robitaille has a knack for making complex subjects fun, clear and digestible.
An eight-year journalist and editor, Jesse regularly contributes news and opinion content to two biweekly national print publications, Canadian Stamp News and Canadian Coin News.
As a freelancer, he creates other print and digital content, including blog posts, ghostwritten stories and long-form features, for clients and publications in Canada and the United States. Aside from journalism and non-fiction, he specializes in digital and physical ad copy, public relations and professional communications material plus other engaging content such as newsletters, contests and surveys. He also has experience in website design, development and administration.
Jesse is a member of the invite-only Philatelic Specialists Society of Canada. He previously served as a director of the Royal Philatelic Society of Canada; the editor of the Ontario Numismatic Association’s Ontario Numismatist; the secretary of the asset-based community development group Fitzgerald Neighbours; an infantry soldier in the Canadian Forces; and the long-time bassist of the touring band Street Pharmacy.
