Age 12-14

Nine Stamps, One Big Adventure, one page to collect them on

Long before email or text messages, people waited weeks for letters to cross oceans and mountains. Then came airplanes — and mail suddenly flew. Between 1928 and 1946, Canada issued just nine official airmail stamps, numbered C1 through C9. Together they tell the story of how a young country learned to fly its mail.

It all began with C1 in 1928, the “Allegory of Flight” stamp showing two winged messengers passing letters through the clouds. In 1930, C2 pictured a globe wrapped in mail routes — proof that airmail was shrinking the world. When postal rates changed in 1932, older stamps were surcharged with new values to create C3 and C4, and C4 also honoured the Imperial Economic Conference held in Ottawa. C5 (1935) featured Daedalus, the flying hero from Greek myth, and C6 (1938) showed a real bush plane bringing mail to the Northwest Territories — a lifeline for remote communities. During the Second World War, C7 and C8 (1942–43) pictured a powerful transport plane, and C9 in 1946 celebrated peace with a flock of Canada geese soaring across the sky.

Aerophilatelists — people who collect airmail — don’t just save the stamps themselves. They also hunt for envelopes flown on the very first flights, called covers, often stamped with special cachet designs and sometimes signed by the pilots. They collect colourful airmail etiquette labels, printed route maps that show where a flight travelled, old black-and-white photographs of the planes and the brave crews who flew them, and letters autographed by the pilots themselves. Every one of these pieces helps tell the bigger story of how mail conquered the sky.

Ready to start your own collection? Download the album page that goes with this article, print it on letter-size paper, and slip your first nine airmail stamps into place. Nine little squares of paper, and a whole sky full of adventure waiting for you.