Any Interest In World Postal Stationery?

A couple obscure U.S. pieces tonight. The first is an official imprint from the the War Department on a wrapper used to convey weather reports for the signal corps. I believe this is WO31, first issued in 1873.



The other is UX11, the smallest postal card ever issued by the Post Office Department. This is only 117mm in length. I thought at first it had been trimmed down, but this is full size. Perhaps the post office was trying to save a bit in paper weight. It came out in 1891, along with another card of the same design in black ink, in a larger format of 155mm.

Here's one of the nicest fully engraved postcards I've seen -- a UPU message/reply pair from Honduras. This was produced by Hamilton Bank Note from an intaglio plate and is nearly as ornate as the stocks and bonds the company printed. The cost of this type of printing is relatively expensive -- probably close the the face value of the card itself!

Yes the Central & South American early postal stationery was usually very ornate. Makes one wonder why, when there are very few "Used" copies of these around. Whomever the salesman was to convince these countries they needed them, should have retired very wealthy! Ha!

My guess is the banknote companies played each government against their neighbors. It became a matter of national pride to "keep up with the Jones's" particularly with Universal Postal Union material, which (in theory) would be representing your country when it arrived across the border.

Cyprus, around 1992. Poscard with the 2 printed stamps

Here are a couple of items from the Stuttgart local post:



The first is a newspaper wrapper, the other two are envelopes.

Picked these up at our local WSP show, SEAPEX, earlier this month.

Normally I don't go for unused items, but these just looked too nice and the dealer was not asking much for them.

ekbustad: Nice find!

Very attractive! I wonder why on a lot of early Germanic postal stationery they chose to place the "stamp" in the upper left. Or maybe the better question is, how did the upper right become the standard international placement?

Here is a Swiss wrapper, also with a UL placement.

Here are 3 new ICELAND postal cards, fresh from the Iceland PO:

A couple postcards from two conquests of the Spanish-American War. I'm not sure when Cuba went from a possession to a republic -- or was it just temporarily occupied?

The Philippines stamps with the Victory is not related to Spanish-American at all. it was issue after US liberate the Philippines from the Japaneses at the end of WW II

Can you tell me the name of the guy on the stamp without Google ???

we even have a monument to honour him in Montréal

After the US invasion of 1898 and the subsequent Treaty of Paris of December 1898, the US held Cuba "in trust" for its inhabitants. The US military administration remained in place until May 1902, when Cuba became an "independent" republic. In practice, this independence was circumscribed, among other things by the Platt Amendment, under which the US reserved the right to send troops into Cuba if Cuba entered into treaty relationships witha foreign power. The right was not abrogated until 1934. Thereafter, Cuba remained a US client state until the liberation, when Batista high-tailed it to the Dominican Republic with somewhere between $300 and $700 million.

Here are 4 Swiss aerogrammes that depict Zeppelin events

Those are quite nice! Were the Hindenburg cachets officially added by the postal service or were they unofficial?