Page 35 - Delcampe Collections classiques EN-005

Stamps

to change the direction of travel
of the balloon, he moved the steak
either to the left or to the right
or downwards or upwards if he
wanted to ascend or descend.”

What if smileys were already used
in the 19th century?
Smileys are so omnipresent these
days that they are accessible via a
character font on our smartphones. [1] Typographical cancellation with a 1c empire with lau-
Last 7 June, La Poste issued a book rel on the Journal de Villefranche of 8 December 1870
2
of self-adhesive stamps to cele- Cancellation of a non-political newspaper distributed in
brate the 50 years of “The Smiley the department or a bordering department
Company”.
As is often the case with
Internet-related technology, the his-
tory is confused, likely because it’s
too recent. It should be noted that
3
the word smiley is a generic word
which describes emojis and emoti-
cons, very different techniques the
purpose of which, in both cases,
is to represent an emotion with a
symbolic face:
4
• Emoticons use typographical
characters and are, therefore,
potentially, older than printing
itself. The best-known ones
are :-) and :-( that is, happy and
unhappy faces. There is also a
Japanese version, called kao-
moji, which is enriched by the di-
verse Japanese punctuation, for
example anger (#`Д´). The pur-
pose of an emoticon is to sym-
bolically represent an emotion.
5
• Emojis appeared more recently [2] An excerpt of the Journal de Villefranche of Thurs-
day, 8 December 1870 entitled “Du bon usage du
‘beefsteack’”

Delcampe Magazine 35