Recovering historical inflation data from postal stamps prices

For many developing countries, historical inflation figures are rarely available. We propose a simple method, which aims to recover such figures thereby using prices of postal stamps, issued in earlier years.
We illustrate our method for Suriname where annual inflation rates are available for 1961 until 2015, and where fluctuations in inflation rates are prominent. We estimate the inflation rates for the sample 1873 to 1960.
Our main finding is that high inflation periods usually last no longer than 2 or 3 years.