Sunday stamps: books, authors

Today's Sunday Stamps theme is 'books / authors'.

According to many postcrossing profiles, books are popular among mail lovers. And among mailing people there are several librarians. Thanks to John I received this stamp which shows a library. It is one of my favourites as it shows the evolution of reading. And, according to Royal Mail, the evolution of information technology:



Belarus Post has issued these stamps in 1997 in honour of one of the first book printers in Eastern Europe, Frantzisk Skaryna (for more information, see for instance here and here):




Similar to mail, books connect the writer and the reader. And sometimes postage stamps themselves connect countries, via joint issues.
This stamp I received thanks to Eva, and connects Morocco and Monaco:



Dutch PostNL happens to have issued a book stamp sheet recently. Only after purchasing this stamp sheet and reading the words in the selvage, I learned that 2016 was the 'Year of the Book'! Did you know is was?



Two books of which I used to mix up the title and author, for the title is a person's name, are Don Quixote and Max Havelaar.

Regarding the first mentioned: these Spanish stamps have been designed on behalf of a contest in honour of the author Miguel de Cervantes.
The book character Don Quixote and his good friend Sancho Panza you can see on the stamp on the left. And I am not sure whether the portrait on the right is the book character or the author:



Concerning Max Havelaar, he isn't the writer but the main character of the book 'Max Havelaar', written in 1860 by Multatuli, pen name of Eduard Douwes Dekker.
The stamp shows a portrait of the author, and a quote from the book. 'Ik groet u allen zeer' means 'I'm greeting all of you very much'.

Although I've never read Multatuli's Max Havelaar ('Max Havelaar: Or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company'), I think it an important book. In colonial times the Europeans have done a lot of harm to the people in the countries they colonized. Multatuli was one of the few who, by for instance this book, openly critized the abuses of colonialism, in this case in the Dutch East Indies (today's Indonesia).



I hope to find some time some day to read this book. But - maybe you recognize it: my 'to-read'pile' is large..


A book on the selvage you can see here, it belongs to a stamp of the famous children's book character Paddington Bear:



What else to do with books?
You can keep them above your head, as did the woman on this Japanese illustration:



The image is part of a woodcut print, created in 1854 by Utagawa Kunisada, as part of a serie 'parody at six poets'. The artwork is in the Rijksmuseum, whose collection you also can find on the internet. The complete picture you can see here.
The stamp is part of a ten stamps sheet, issued in 2013 in honour of the Rijksmuseum. You can see the other (non-book) stamps and more details here.

Finally: what would books be without readers?
This pretty colourful stamp I received from Russia:



See more stamps related to this theme at and via today's Sunday Stamps!