Excerpt: Stamp collection provides rare picture of North Korea

By Jack Wang, UChicago News

A 2011 North Korean stamp depicts Megalosaurus bucklandi, a carnivorous Jurassic dinosaur. The stamp is one of more than 2,000 now held by UChicago Library and searchable in an online database.

A group of masked dancers, frozen in dramatic poses. A plane descending at an airport, with another trailing in the distance. And a pair of … carnivorous dinosaurs?

These disparate images all can be found within the University of Chicago Library’s new collection of North Korean stamps, assembled in a public online database to provide a unique glimpse of the insular country. The stamps, which span from 1962 to 2018, capture a variety of scenes, settings and characters—ranging from explicit propaganda to traditional Korean garb to simple depictions of wildlife.

“I was very surprised,” said Jee-Young Park, the Korean Studies librarian at UChicago who built the collection. “It’s not only political matters. It’s a variety of subjects, like nature, culture, history, art and music.”

The traditional Korean Bongsan masked dance (2000).

Acquiring the stamps from a variety of Chinese and Korean vendors as well as a private collector from Germany, Park found them in unexpectedly pristine condition, a sharp deviation from the physical state of many North Korean books and periodicals that end up in the hands of researchers.

Read the full article here.