Postage From The Edge

"Purist collectors didn't like them," says Len Nadybal, who lives east of Leesburg and may own the world's most extensive Bhutanese stamp collection. The space theme was called a gimmick, he adds, since most Bhutanese had never watched a space launch.

The average Bhutanese also couldn't afford the postage. Some of Todd's stamps cost 1.25 ngultrums (equal to 17.5 cents then, Nadybal says), at a time when a 20-gram letter to India had a rate of 20 chhetrum (1/100th of a ngultrum).

Yet Todd produced five more space sets, including one in 1969 to celebrate the moon landing no one in Bhutan saw. He set up premium giveaway programs at U.S. supermarkets. Shoppers earned Bhutanese stamps with the purchase of groceries.

"My father was no dummy," Stewart says, "and he would not have elected to stay in this business for as many years as he did if he was losing money."

So it continued. Stamps made of stainless steel, which, in the Pittsburgh tradition, rusted; 33 1/3 -rpm record stamps that played traditional folk songs and a history of Bhutan narrated by Todd; stamps scented like a rose, which, collector Rod Remlinger claims, "lasted over 20 years before they lost their smell."

By 1973, Bhutan's greatest source of revenue was its stamps, adds Remlinger, president of the Sno-King Stamp Club in Washington state. Alas, that was the end of the line. A new king opened the country to tourists in 1974 and terminated Todd's contract. Remlinger says Bhutan could no longer tolerate the impractically high postal rates.

But the years that followed only compounded a cultural irony. Now that Bhutan was known for its unique stamps, which were American creations fabricated in Nassau, it forfeited that heritage in favor of blatantly American, cheaper designs, signing with the Intergovernmental Philatelic Corp., an agency that serviced other countries.

"The same stamp would be issued with a different country's name on it," says Mike Vickerman, who sells his collection's duplicates on his Web site, Bhutanstamp.com. "It kinda destroyed the local personality of a lot of stamps. Like they'll issue Dianas and Kennedys and Elvis Presleys and Columbuses and such."

In the '90s, Bhutan printed Donald Duck watching television on the back of a yak. Still, the post office was taking in $485,000 a year from foreign collectors, who had suddenly formed a cult around the original Todd designs, including embossed lithographs from 1968 that reproduced Monets and van Goghs.

"Someone will put an ad in a stamp magazine: 'Looking for Bhutan Stamps,' " Nadybal says. Then he and his friends will joke, "Oh, there's a new guy." Nadybal even ran a quarterly Bhutan stamp magazine for three or four years. He got 80 subscribers. He recently saw a vinyl record stamp go for $375 at a Virginia show. Bhutan's tourist tours stop at the post office.

In recent years other countries have imitated tiny Bhutan: Finland embedded video in a stamp, Switzerland printed one on wood. The Dutch and Japanese have scratch-off lottery stamps.

Todd's very last idea, the one he ached to do before passing away in 2006 at 81, was the CD-ROM. "Yeah, that's a great idea, Dad," Stewart would tell him, "but you're not gonna do it."

Then he was gone. Stewart's Pittsburgh business, Creative Products International, made toys for pets and children. But she couldn't help it. "I was driven somehow to go back there," she says, after her seventh trip to Bhutan in two years. "And there's no question. I find I'm working day and night about this, but I am not alone -- because Burt Todd is by my side opening doors all the time."