"The reverse depicts the 1-cent stamp of 1856 of British Guiana which features the same vessel as that shown on the colony's badge (see East Caribbean States KM-7) and bears the colony's Latin motto DAMUS PETIMUS QUE VICISSIM (We Give And We Seek in Return). The obverse depicts Queen Elizabeth II. The stamp was printed in British Guiana (now Guyana) in black ink on magenta (purplish red) paper. Its corners were snipped off, giving it an octagonal shape.

The printing was ordered as an emergency issue by E.T.E. Dalton, the colony's postmaster, when the stock of regular stamps of the colony was sold out before arrival of a fresh shipment from Waterlow & Sons, the London printers. The stamp, at the 1-cent rate for newspapers (the rate for letters was 4 cents), was initialed by a post office employee as a security measure. The only stamp known of this issue was discovered in 1873 by a 12-year-old schoolboy living in Georgetown, British Guiana. It is the world’s rarest stamp and was sold in 1980 for $935,000.

The coin honors Rowland Hill (1795-1879), an English schoolmaster who in 1837 published a pamphlet titled Post Office Reform: Its Importance and Practicability, in which he proposed the use of pre-printed envelopes and adhesive postage stamps to indicate prepayment of postage. Hill’s plan also called for a uniform low postage rate to anywhere in the British Isles, instead of the existing variable rate that depended on distance and the number of sheets of paper used and which was payable by the receiver.

Hill’s invention, for which he was knighted, made communication by mail both affordable to the masses and practical, and resulted in the issue of the first stamp in the world in England in 1840. The titanium of the coins was colored red through a special heat process, to convert the metal from the silver-white color obtained upon refining. The red color alludes to the color of the stamp. Titanium was discovered in 1791. The first coin made of the metal was issued by Gibraltar in 1999."