What Was In Your Mailbox Today??

A friend from Thailand went on a tour of Switzerland, in June. She knows I collect stamps. It looks like she came across a stamp shop and bought a few stamps to send me. They arrived two weeks ago. They are Swiss Pro Juventute stamps from the late 1930s and 1940s. A very nice gesture.

After delivery had been postponed twice, I, finally, received a recent auction win. The seller uses stamps on his sendings. This one has a complete miniature sheet from the "Beautiful Netherlands" series, from 2016. Many sheets had five examples of a single stamp. This sheet had five different stamps representing old fishing villages.

Since Scheveningen, nowadays, is a neighbourhood of The Hague, the cancellation is relevant to the miniature sheet.

Cropped upper right of an envelope received a couple days ago. U.S. postcard rate stamp used to pay first-class domestic rate. Sender saved 17 cents!

Nice. Though I am surprised to see the Dog Bite slogan cancel is still being used -- especially from Boston. Most of my incoming mail recently has the 1775-2025 slogan, celebrating the 250th anniversary of the US Postal Service.

With its history, I would have expected Boston to be one of the first cities to switch out all their machines to use the new cancel, especially since Boston was allegedly home to the first post office in North America.


Edit to add: I love the placement of this cancel, how it looks like the Eagle has grabbed the manatee and is pulling it out of the water.

A used Poland set and two Columbia 1898 coat of arms stamps via ebay for my worldwide collection. Pitney Bowls 74 cent homeprinted postage on both evnelopes. Wonder if they used 3 cents of ink from their printer? I'd rather use real stamps.

Today I got a full sheet of Monaco #818 featuring the fabulist Jean de la Fontaine, issued in 1972. The problem is that the sheet is too large to exhibit flat, even in a big Lindner album, so I'm going to have to fold the sheet (along the perforations, of course) at some point to make it fit. Which offends my sense of philatelic purity! I mean, I own other oversized sheets that were folded, but someone else always did it before I got hold of it. This time I have to grit my teeth and do it myself... Ugh. Haven't been able to... yet...

It sounds like you need a bigger album to store that sheet, and your other big sheets that are unfortunately already folded.

An art supply store should have some medium sized and bigger portfolios that you could use. If you desire, put a single stamp, or a photograph of the entire sheet, in your regular album that references the larger auxiliary album. If you search SCF for "large sheet storage" you'll find a few examples, such as
https://goscf.com/t/82942

While not as traumatic as people trimming off wide selvedge to fit into an album, folding a sheet is also something that cannot be undone.

ZebraMan, yeah, you're right, although I wasn't keen on using a large portfolio (storage space and all that), it's better than damaging the sheet.

Finally received my cachet from a July auction. Better late than never!

1931 GRAF-ZEPPELIN POLAR FLIGHT (Frost #127-A), German Polar Flight stamp #C41 on a flight cachet 1¢ USA postal card pays the 2 Mark flight fee + 1¢ printed matter rate to USA, departing FRIEDRICHSHAVEN on Jul 24,1931 and dropped to the Russian Icebreaker MALYGUIN in Polar waters postmarked Jul 27th, then forwarded to the addressee at Hilo-Hawaii arriving Sep 19, 1931.

As with other Graf Zeppelin flights, the polar expedition was largely financed with revenue from stamp collectors. Graf Zeppelin transferred about 650 pounds of mail to the Malygin, and picked up about 270 pounds of mail from the Soviet ship in return; about 50,000 pieces of philatelic mail in total were carried on the flight.

You can search and find numerous Youtube videos of this historic flight.

I have another instance of the previous owner of a collection I bought a while ago assigning a stamp to the wrong space, and it's an instance where there are two different stamps that look very much alike and the previous owner put in two copies of the same stamp. In this case it's a collection of France that I bought a few years ago. When I get time I look through it and try to fill in as many empty spaces as I can afford. I was looking through the pages from the 1930's recently and noticed that there were two copies of Scott 372, and no copy of 373. This is the two stamp series commemorating the 1939-40 New York World's Fair. The 2.25 franc stamp was issued in 1939, and the following year a 2.50 franc stamp was issued looking almost identical except for the denomination. Since I needed a 373 I ordered one and it arrived the other day, In looking through the semi-postal section, there were a lot of stamps placed in the wrong spaces, especially the Sinking Fund overprints from the late 1920's when each year the French government overprinted several of the "Sower" stamps and each year they would overprint a different color of the 40 centime value. There are a lot of empty spaces there as well and I will attempt to fill them in.

(a few weeks ago)

Some dealers still use stamps on mail. It, probably, is the only way you can get a full miniature sheets in used condition.

Recently got my 100 WW Large exchange mailing from the International Society of Worldwide Stamp Collectors. Found 16 stamps to add to my collection. This is turning out to be a good way to fill many inexpensive spaces in my albums and dispose of my many duplicates.

Still adding some early issues to my France collection. As a Christmas treat to myself (I got an unexpected bonus at work) I bought a Strasbourg Exhibition souvenir sheet, Scott 241, issued June 4, 1927, most of these go for a pretty hefty sum, but this one was reasonably priced. It looks like it was attached to a sheet of paper to preserve it then cancelled on the 7th of June, presumably during the run of the Exhibition

In 1937, the Estado Español issued a series known as "Cifras, Cid e Isabel' after the design types. I like the issue. I could find very little information on this and other Spanish issues of the Civil War era.

Some time ago, I came across the dissertation by Enrique Viruega Morales for the Real Academia Hispánica de Filatelia e Historia Postal (RAHF, no. LII) that studied the issue. On its website, the RAHF states it is available at € 20. I sent them an email to inquire after the possibility of ordering a copy. In true Spanish fashion, my mail remained unanswered.

When, recently, I was staying in near the Ópera in Madrid and found the address published on the RAHF website was near my hotel, I walked there. Unfortunately, there was no one present. Two weeks ago, a Spanish dealer offered it. So, I ordered a copy. The postman just handed it to me.

At a first glance, there are many images. I also noted a chapter on overprints. The stamps were overprinted to pay for the fee of carriage on Lufthansa's flight TO 191 from Las Palmas to Lisbon - connecting with TO 22 to Burgos - and Frankfurt.

I got a notification card of a stamp show in Sarasota FL on January 16-17. I probably won't be going, but thats what I got in the mail today.