The artist/designer Adil Salahuddin is fortunate. He is alive. He can read in his lifetime this tribute to his work as an artist and designer par excellence of postage stamps. Titled Message Sent: The Life and Works of Adil Salahuddin: A Legendary Postage Stamp Designer, this sumptuous volume has been compiled by the British-Pakistani author Ms Arshi Ahmad-Aziz who writes corporate histories, and is sponsored by a bank. The book contains a summation of Adil?s educational background, the making of him as an artist, his graduation from an artist to a stamp designer, a collage of the numerous stamps he designed over his 37 year long career with the Pakistan Security Printing Corporation (PSPC). There is also a chapter on conversations with him, tributes from his friends and colleagues, and finally a survey of Pakistan?s genesis and growth as a nation as seen in its stamps.

I have known Adil Salahuddin since 1966 when he was a student at the National College of Arts (NCA) and I worked in an honorary capacity at the Lahore Museum cataloguing its superb collection of miniature paintings. The NCA was at that time under the principalship of Professor Shakir Ali, one of Pakistan?s earliest modernist painters. Khalid Iqbal - the artist who gave Punjab?s landscape a new identity ? headed the NCA?s Department of Fine Arts. Both played a seminal influence in transforming Adil into one of the most significant designers of his generation.

In the autumn of 1966, Adil and his batch-mate Muhammad Asif - both lean and wiry ? had grown tired of painting the old models hired on its shoestring budget by the NCA. Khalid approached me and suggested that as I provided a younger face, I might like to sit for these two budding painters. The first portraits they made of me made me looked like a wooden mannequin. By the time I quit the museum the following summer, their skills had improved immeasurably. The second portraits they did showed me standing, full-length, with my arms folded across my chest. They submitted these works in their thesis portfolio. I never found out what happened to these paintings. Perhaps they are still buried somewhere in the vaults of the NCA, waiting like some buried Pharaoh to be unearthed.

Adil Salahuddin graduated. He moved to Karachi, and took up employment with the PSPC, a body established by the Government of Pakistan in 1949 to make us independent in our needs for currency and stamps as most countries ? certainly those in the British empire ? depended for their bank notes and currency on the firm of De La Rue in distant England.

The first adhesive British stamp was issued in 1840. Known as the Penny Black, it featured an image of Queen Victoria against a severe black background (and this was years before she went into mourning after the death of her husband, her beloved Prince Albert). Just over a hundred years later, Pakistan used as its first stamps after independence the image of her great-grandson King George VI, over-printed with the proud announcement: Pakistan.

The first Pakistani stamps (still printed by De La Rue) came out on 9 July 1948. The highest denomination of Rs 1 bore a floral design by the immortal artist Abdur Rahman Chughtai. The lower denominations of 3? annas depicted the Lahore Fort?s entrance, the 2? annas the Star gate at Karachi airport, and the 1? annas the Constituent Building (now the Sindh Assembly Building) in Karachi. (Interestingly, there was none of East Pakistan). The latter three stamps were designed by Rashid-ud-din and Muhammad Latif.