They will bow to Van Gogh when instructed to and  stamp on Van Gogh when no one tells them not to.

Your priceless stamp collection!

The couple paid 15 cents for a stamp, which is all it costs to send the child,

and was so inexpressibly tickled, that he was obliged to get up off the sofa and stamp.

If you submit it to the office, make sure to get a time stamp put on it so that I can be sure the paper was submitted on time.

William Pitt the Elder, Britain's leading statesman, was suffering a gout flare-up during the parliamentary debate of the Stamp Act in 1764.

During the Olympics, they had a Tokyo 2020 stamp which I think is pretty cool.

That's a key theme when looking at 17th century literature and processes of reading, the idea of being active with what you're reading and kind of connecting to the book that you're reading. So even the act of stamping a book with an ex-libris stamp that has your name on it or your family crest traditionally. Frances Wolferston, for example, in the 17th century would write Frances, her book, in the front of her books. But there's a connection and there's an ownership to reading that which involves the reader and actually kind of physically puts the reader into the book. And that ownership, that connection definitely feels more valid and understandable considering how much rarer books were. I mean, books are still pretty expensive but when you compare the price to what it used to be, they are so, so, so affordable and they are affordable enough that, especially if we're shopping second hand, we can accumulate a lot of books. And so it kind of makes sense that we wouldn't then like customise all of our books and kind of write our names and all of our books in the same way. Though not to say that not everyone does because I do think the ex-libris stamp is making something of a comeback. But I just love how grangerising makes a book personal to you and the book itself then reflects and is testament to how much a book means to you. It kind of becomes this material marker in relation to you as the reader. It also bestows importance onto the physical object of the book as well as just the text. Like this book is significant because I bought this when I was 17 and I've read it four times since then and so it's kind of joined me in a very material way in many different life stages and it's kind of transcended time and moved with me which I think is absolutely beautiful. Effectively when you add your own illustrations, when you add tiny kind of snippets and annotations and thoughts, you're adding to the paratext of the book as well. And I think when we kind of frame it as a form of paratext, it kind of helps to even better frame like the importance of your personal copy to you as a reader. Paratext was kind of most officially and famously theorised by Jeannette in his book Paratext from 1987 and paratext is all of the stuff around the actual text. So this is the text and then the paratext will be like, you know, the four words or in this book there's quotes at the beginning from Stephen Hawking. There are dedications, there are words of thanks, you've got the information about publication, you've got like other works by Margaret Atwood here, you've got the cover, you've got what else? Oh yeah, more books by Margaret Atwood there. And these are things which are connected to the text but they're not actually part of the text and so when you grangerise a book

And of course, they stamp it their own way.

With that stamp and a book, you got a real nice hook.