Per Anders Fogelström stamps
This stamp series was issued by PostNord Sweden on the occasion of the centennial of Per Anders Fogelström (1917–1998).
[Fogelström] debuted as an author in the 1940s and is most known for his five-volume series about the working class and impoverished in Stockholm. You could say he became their voice. The first novel in the series, Mina drömmars stad (City of My Dreams), was published in 1960. The stamp motifs are inspired by this novel. — PostNord
The five landmarks depicted on the stamps are Katarinahissen, Hammarby sjö (2 variants), Barnängens fabrik, Kornhamnstorg, and Stigbergsgatan. The stamps were designed by Gustav Mårtensson, using photos from the Stockholm City Museum and the Lennart Börjesson Collection.
For the typeface, Mårtensson went with Kumla, an idiosyncratic caps-only face made by Göran Söderström and issued with Letters from Sweden in 2013. The design is inspired by the letters on the facade of Kumla Skofabrik, a shoe factory in a small town west of Stockholm. The sign was first documented in 1920 (or 1916?), in the period that is covered by the third volume of Fogelström’ series, Minns du den stad.
Blending Art Nouveau naïvety with industrial rigidness, Kumla’s letterforms also work well for evoking earlier decades. For the titles of the five novels on the First Day Cover, they were slanted and set on an angle. In addition, they were considerably stretched, turning the wide monolinear Kumla into a narrow face with horizontal stress. What would look amateurish and ugly in most other cases here looks convincingly vintage.
Souvenir sheet with a portrait of Fogelström.
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Fun fact: Every time a designer at PostNord picks a typeface by Göran Söderström, the stamp qualifies for my set “2+ typefaces by 1 designer”: Since 2013 the fine print is set in a custom typeface named Etsa Secure. Commissioned by Gustav Mårtensson, it was created by Söderström together with Örjan Nordling at Pangea and has to “work at a point size barely readable to a human eye”. Read more about it on Pangea’s website and on Type Journal.