Stamping on Dracula's Name

While it is good to see the author of Dracula honoured with the recent launch of four new stamps to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Bram Stoker's birth in Dublin, and the centenary of his famous creation, the stamps themselves are disappointing.

Dracula, the book, is a superb work of fiction, and few books have so successfully evoked pure terror. It is a story to make the reader tremble.

The stamps on the other hand reduce Stoker's terrifying vision of Dracula to a fancy-dress caricature, a stock Hallowe'en figure. The various representations of Dracula in his castle, rising from his coffin, nuzzling the neck of Lucy and hiding in the woods, evoke laughter rather than terror. And while stamp artistry is a demanding medium with obvious restrictions, there is nothing in any of the four stamps to suggest the book's themes of infection, pestilence and decay.

As a commemorative gesture these stamps are therefore reductive. Dracula looks about as frightening as my late Aunt Theosopha even before the dementia set in, and Bram Stoker deserves better.

Such a disappointment might almost have been expected given the rationale behind the issue of these stamps. Back in March, An Post blithely confirmed it was ignoring requests to commemorate the 1400th anniversary (this year) of the death of the Irish saint Colmcille, sound Donegal-man, and kin to the King of Tara.

It expressed no interest one way or another in the fact that the Royal Mail was issuing a series of four stamps featuring the saint credited with bringing Christianity to Scotland.

However, An Post was eager to publicise the forthcoming Dracula stamp issues. An Post's interest however did not seem to focus on Bram Stoker's brilliance: it appeared interested only in the money to be made from pictorial images of Dracula, however comical they might be.

A spokesman for An Post, Mr David Curtin, was quoted at the time as saying that the commemorative Dracula stamp was "all about commerce", and it would be much in demand among stamp collectors.

Yes, just ask Phil Ately, the doyen of collectors.

And hard luck, Colmcille. You should have tried to write a best-seller instead of wasting your time promoting the Christian faith. You betrayed a terrible lack of commercial instinct. Still, it was probably all the mother's fault, the crowd from the Fanad peninsula were always that way, a bit otherworldly, it's to be expected.

Bram Stoker certainly deserves a more fitting commemoration, though if he had not written Dracula (at the age of 50), he might otherwise be entirely forgotten.

As is evident from Barbara Belford's biography (Bram Stoker: a Biography of the Author of Dracula. Weidenfeld, £25), the author was a very shadowy figure. To the horror of his family, the Trinity graduate gave up a sensible career in the Civil Service for the delights of theatre - or more specifically, the management of the life and career of Henry Irving. Later he became a barrister, and soon after a failed barrister. Then came the book.

Stoker's other claim to fame was his marriage to Florence Farr, said to be one of the three most beautiful women in London (Oscar Wilde chased her passionately for a while).

Perhaps An Post might consider issuing stamps to commemorate Irish Citizens Who Have Given up Sensible Careers in the Civil Service, or Citizens Married to Society Beauties (male or female, of course). If there's a commercial angle, we can rely on An Post to spot it.

Right. I read that more than three quarters of a million people watched the first lengthy episode of RTE's new drama series, Making the Cut, last Sunday night. I watched it myself, though my appetite for slick screen violence is pretty well sated, and had not realised Waterford was such an exciting place: the Temple Bar of the South East.

The series is based on stories by author Jim Lusby, and he has described Det Insp Carl McCadden (played by the excellent Sean McGinley) as a maverick, but an attractive one: an intelligent, intuitive man "addicted to high-quality coffee in a city where he is continually offered tea".

If Waterford can only catch up with Temple Bar's coffee-shop standards there will be no stopping it.