Post Modern

Postage stamps of odd shapes and sizes have been around for decades. The Pacific island nation of Tonga released coin- and star-shaped stamps in the 1960s and '70s; Sierra Leone once produced a kola nut-shaped offering; New Caledonia has had stamps shaped like turtles and other sea mammals. But these days odd shapes alone won't cut it, which is why national post offices and stamp manufacturers are coming up with new twists on the standard colorful squares and rectangles.

In the past decade, a dozen or so places have released scratch-and-sniff and lick-and-taste stamps. Switzerland had a chocolate-scented version, Britain a eucalyptus one, New Zealand a magnolia-smelling stamp and Hong Kong one that tasted of green tea. Britain has also produced a stamp with a hologram, and Switzerland a Braille stamp.

Earlier this year, Austria released a stamp that shrank a football to, well, postage-stamp size, to mark the country's role as co-host of this year's European soccer championships. The self-adhesive stamps were not only circular, but made of the same polyurethane mix as the balls that players used in the June tournament. The Austrian post office printed some 500,000 and they sold for just under $6 each.

Some of the strangest stamps over the past couple of decades have come from the tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, or, more accurately, from a Pittsburgh-based company that produces stamps for Bhutan. Bhutan was the first to release 3-D stamps (including a series of masks and one of the country's much-loved mushrooms), silk stamps, steel stamps, scented stamps (way back in 1973) and even a stamp that could be played on a tiny record player. Now come the world's first CD-ROM stamps, containing documentaries about the country and marking Bhutan's political shift from kingdom to constitutional monarchy. Talk about pushing the envelope.