AtDDtA1: Seal

[Tore Rye Andersen]

>From: robinlandseadel at comcast.net

>And stamps/philatilic concerns start popping up on page 18
>with the character of of Miss Penelope ("Penny") Black, something
>I missed altogether until [Jeffrey Meikle wrote]:
>
>Don't know if this has been mentioned, but "penny black" is the nickname of
>the first adhesive postage stamp--issued by Great Britain in 1840.

In fact, this stamp also makes an (unnamed) appearance on p. 231, in 
Grandmaster Cohen's discussion of Queen Victoria's reluctance to face her 
own mortality:

"Now, we have also Victoria's unbending refusals to consider the passage of 
Time, for example her insistence for more than sixty years that the only 
postal image of her be that of the young girl on the first adhesive stamps 
of 1840, the year of dim young Oxford's assassination attempt."

This is typically Pynchon: His first reference to this particular stamp is 
pretty oblique, since the name Penny Black is given to a character in the 
novel, and the second reference is just as oblique, since it doesn't name 
the stamp outright, but taken together these oblique references gain weight 
and significance. I'm currently rereading the novel, and more and more of 
these initially hidden (albeit hidden in plain sight) connections keep 
appearing, just as they have in Pynchon's previous novels.

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