Art Deco you can afford
hen French trade authorities announced plans to hold their Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes at Paris in 1925 the term Art Deco had yet to enter the Oxford English Dictionary. I could find no example of its use in any popular British newspaper, despite the term’s neat abbreviation of the exhibition’s full title. British stamp collectors, on the other hand, talked and wrote about the forthcoming expo in the French capital for months before it opened; not because they collected, or even recognized, examples of the style; but because a desirable set of commemoratives was promised. Here is what a philatelic column in a British regional newspaper had to say about the exhibition and the promised stamps associated with
