Stamp review: Festivals 5780 -- Apples in Honey (2019-09-18)

Apples in Honey (Festivals 5780) | פרחי דבש

The last thing a new stamp wants to be is forgettable. When it comes off the press and makes its way to post offices around the country, the new stamp wants to stand out and be meaningful. It wants to be in demand, to trend on social media, to have a shelf life that extends beyond the arrival of the next new stamp. What is the formula for achieving this dual goal of popularity and longevity? How can a stamp both capture the public's attention and then retain that attention once it has it?

"Apples in Honey," a three-stamp set issued as a souvenir minisheet by Israel Post on September 18th, 2019, struck me early on as a forgettable issue. Designed by Baruch Naeh and Sharon Israel, the set depicts three honey flowers common in Israel -- sage, citrus and eucalyptus -- with each flower enclosed in an apple-shaped outline and surrounded by the colors purple, light blue and peach, respectively. The words "THAT WILL BE RENEWED AS A GOOD AND SWEET YEAR" are printed across the perforated margin above the stamps, alluding to the stamps' issue date coinciding with the Jewish New Year, and the tab below each stamp indicates the name of the flower shown directly above.

The reason I initially dismissed "Apples in Honey" as a potential addition to my collection is that stamps featuring flora and fauna rarely pique my interest. That's not to suggest I don't appreciate the natural world; rather, strictly in the context of philately, stamps that showcase the natural world tend to offer little in the way of novelty, which is an attribute I prioritize highly. Where stamps are most novel and interesting for me is at the nexus of culture and art, human endeavors that are by definition lacking from the natural world.

What was it about "Apples in Honey," then, that eventually won me over? It was a design detail that I had failed to take note of when the stamps were first issued. Virtually all of the world's stamps are perforated in the shape of a square or rectangle. A small minority of stamps are perforated in the shape of a triangle, circle, or some other common geometric shape. A much smaller minority, such as France's Valentine's Day stamps, are perforated in the shape of a heart. For a stamp to be perforated in a shape as complex as an apple is exceedingly rare. Moreover, for a stamp to be perforated in such a way as to give its user a choice between the standard outer square shape and the inner more complex one is so rare that the opportunity to add it to one's collection cannot be passed up, even if it is the stamp's only endearing quality.

Bottom line: 4/5 -- Mild buy. "Apples in Honey" won't turn many heads with its art or inspire many minds with its message, but its perforation pattern will long reward the collector with a penchant for the unusual.