[6] Although these locally produced stamps have a distinct primitive character, they made Barnard's "name immortal in the postal history of Mauritius".

[10] The stamps, as well as the subsequent issues, are highly prized by collectors because of their rarity, their early dates and their primitive character as local products.

In 1928, Georges Brunel published Les Timbres-Poste de l'Île Maurice[13] in which he stated that the use of the words "Post Office" on the 1847 issue had been an error.

Joseph Barnard was an Englishman of Jewish descent from Portsmouth who had arrived in Mauritius in 1838 as a stowaway, thrown off a commercial vessel bound for Sydney.

Through a series of sales, the stamps ultimately were acquired by the famous collector Philipp von Ferrary, and were sold at auction in 1921.

Mauritius "Post Office" stamps and covers have been prize items in collections of famous stamp collectors, including Sir Ernest de Silva, Henry J. Duveen, Arthur Hind, William Beilby Avery, Alfred F. Lichtenstein, and Alfred H. Caspary, among other philatelic luminaries.

[17] The future King George V paid £1,450 for an unused blue Two Pence "Post Office" at an auction in 1904, which was a world record price at the time.

[21] The greatest of all Mauritius collections, that of Hiroyuki Kanai, included unused copies of both the One Penny and Two Pence "Post Office" stamps, the unique "Bordeaux" cover with both the one penny and two pence stamps which has been called "la pièce de résistance de toute la philatélie"[22] or "the greatest item in all philately", and numerous reconstructed sheets of the subsequent issues.

The Case of the One-Penny Orange (1977) by E. V. Cunningham, the pen name of Howard Fast was the first of a series of novels in which Beverly Hills detective Masao Masuto is assigned to solve the murder of a well-known stamp dealer.