In this article, David Gonzalez Corchado, as an excellent researcher and specialist in the “Precursors of the Mail”, from the 14th to the 19th century, puts pre-philately in direct relation with numismatics, two auxiliary disciplines of history.
The article allows us to understand the historical postal development of a century and a half of political and economic upheaval, which was reflected in the transport costs applied to letters and their impact on the Spanish economy of the time when it came to benefiting from a public service.
David González Corchado instructs the reader in a practical and visual way and goes beyond the ink marks, whether handwritten or stamped on the covers of letters and sheets, and putting them in their proper historical context, shows other elements that can enrich our postal history collections and also our numismatic knowledge.
The didactic style of David González Corchado, with curiosities and anecdotes, entertains both a casual reader, a history buff or a collector of Postal History, and proposes challenges to compose the letter carriers from the numismatic pieces of each historical period.
An act as simple today as paying for the delivery of a letter at a post office could become an odyssey in the bygone eras of the 18th and 19th centuries.