A visitor at Stamp Show '05 in Swabhumi. (Below) An inverted head of Victoria, the star exhibit. Pictures by Sanjoy Chattopadhyaya

October 1854. East India Company stamps bearing the Queen Victoria head were being lithographed at the Surveyor-General's office in Calcutta.

It was early days for the process. The first all-India stamp was out just a month ago. The four-anna stamps were to be a bi-colour issue. A frame was printed on the sheet in red dye. Now the sheet was to be fed again into the machine for the engraving of the queen's head inside the frame in blue. But the lithographer fed the sheet in reverse. As a result were produced stamps with inverted Victoria heads. The error, noticed decades later, has made the stamps a world rarity.

One of these inverted heads was part of the three-day philatelic feast at Swabhumi, commemorating 150 years of postal services in India.

'The habit of writing letters has gone down as has stamp-collection as a hobby. There are 10 million philatelic deposit account-holders in China. Here we have barely one million. If we can generate a love for stamps, perhaps letter-writing will also increase,' said P.K. Chatterji, chief postmaster-general, West Bengal circle.

The exhibition had both competitive and invitee sections. It is the internationally acclaimed collections of the invitees that were the eye-catchers. If S.C. Sukhani's inverted head was the star, a Penny Black, the world's first stamp issued in 1841, drew viewers to Basudeb Ganguly's exhibits.

Other collections had more specific themes. Rajesh Bagri specialised on maps, punctuating with philatelic documents his account of how mapping started, how maps are made and even border disputes. On view was a post card mailed to Faulkland Islands in May 1982, the period when Argentina recuperated the territory from England, and cancelled with Argentine postmark. Rameshwar Binani dealt with flags ' on covers, souvenir sheets, postal stationery... Gandhi was a favourite theme, drawing stamps from across the world.

Dealers also put up some rarities for sale. Kailash Nath, who came all the way from Varanasi, had a Scinde dawk. The blue stamp is part of a three-colour series, produced in 1852 for use in Sind, which comprises the first postage stamps in Asia. It carried a price tag of Rs 75,000.

Nath also brought pigeongrams, i.e. mails delivered by pigeons. Among them were three mails flown from Asansol to one Stephen H. Smith Esq, at 25, Eliott Road in Calcutta on February 18, 1931. 'Calcutta has the highest number of collectors in the country. So business is satisfactory,' he smiled.

Other activities ' quiz, sit-and-draw, workshops ' happened on the side. Even Autograph Collectors of India had a stall. Pallavi Majumdar, who has designed this year's Children's Day stamp, signed covers bearing her work at dealer Kalyan Negal's stall. The proceeds from the sale went to CINI-Asha. A tram carried mail from Esplanade to Bidhannagar and a special cover was released on the occasion.

The show ended on Monday, leaving the broadest smiles on five faces ' Anuj Bagri, who won the gold medal in the junior section, and Sangeeta Deogawnka, Md. Safiullah, Deepak Bachawat and Mrinal Roy, joint-winners in the keenly contested senior category.