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. (Photo courtesy of UChicago Library)
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." 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.
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