What is a Cinderella?

The masthead of the Club’s quarterly magazine, The Cinderella Philatelist, lists: “Local stamps, telegraph stamps, railway stamps, revenues/fiscals, forgeries, bogus and phantom issues. Christmas, Red Cross, TB and other charity seals, registration labels, advertisement and exhibition labels and many other items.....”. The phrase “many other items” conceals a multitude of minor stamp-like categories. Among the more curious which have found their way into the pages of The Cinderella Philatelist are copyright royalty stamps found on old gramophone records, glove and mitten duty stamps, and chemical reagent bottle deposit labels. Articles have been published on pseudo-postal stationery, telegram forms, war-time street-appeal lapel tags and envelope economy labels.

There are, however, limits beyond which the definition of a cinderella ought not to be stretched and it is perhaps unlikely that things such as trade, cigarette and telephone cards (unless the image of a stamp is incorporated in the design), matchbox or cheese labels, aerial propaganda leaflets, and other forms of ephemera like notgeld or scrip, will ever fully qualify.