Nigeria may not seem the obvious choice of country for a specialist in postal stationery. With a rather limited set of postal stationery classes and issues involved, the number of pages in the Higgins & Gage catalogue is very small. Furthermore, with most issues up to 1960 printed by De la Rue and with their high quality of work, not many varieties are found. However, when we include the precursors from Lagos, Oil Rivers/Niger Coast Protectorate and Southern Nigeria, and if we look beyond the Higgins & Gage catalogue, a whole new world is unravelled with many possibilities of specialisation turning up, as well as many mysteries.

Possibly owing to the slim offering in Higgins & Gage, the Nigeria area does not seem to have attracted many collectors of the postal stationery in its own right. Most items encountered come from more general postal history collections and are therefore used, and it is scarce types of such items that seem to attract most of the interest on auction sites. Indeed, scarce mint items are occasionally seen on eBay and sold for prices which belie their scarcity. It is my hope that this book will be a small contribution to making the Nigeria area more popular. My interest in Nigeria stems from my childhood in the country. My father worked as a veterinarian in the Northern part from 1955 to 1972, and I spent several months each year there up to the age of 7. My memories are quite vague, and it is only the time in Kano I remember, but it left a life-long fascination with Nigeria, which was also kindled by my father's often expressed love of the country and its people. It was by discovering aerogrammes that my father sent home to his mother in the 1950s that I was introduced to the fascinating world of postal stationery.