The Blue Penny Museum is a stamp museum at Caudan Waterfront in Port Louis, the capital of Mauritius. It opened in November 2001.
The museum collection includes the 1847 Blue Penny and Red Penny stamps. The stamps were bought in 1993 for $2,000,000 by a consortium of Mauritian enterprises headed by The Mauritius Commercial Bank and brought back to Mauritius after almost 150 years. For conservation, the originals are illuminated only temporarily. Most of the time only copies are to be seen.
The museum, founded by The Mauritius Commercial Bank, also houses the original statue of Paul and Virginia, created in 1881 by Prosper d'Épinay.
Famous quotes containing the words blue, penny and/or museum:
“Buz, quoth the blue fly,
Hum, quoth the bee,
Buz and hum they cry,
And so do we:
In his ear, in his nose, thus, do you see?
He ate the dormouse, else it was he.”
—Ben Jonson (1572–1637)
“And not an hour ago you hadn’t a penny to warm your pocket. Did someone die and leave you a pot of gold?”
—Dudley Nichols (1895–1960)
“When I go into a museum and see the mummies wrapped in their linen bandages, I see that the lives of men began to need reform as long ago as when they walked the earth. I come out into the streets, and meet men who declare that the time is near at hand for the redemption of the race. But as men lived in Thebes, so do they live in Dunstable today.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)