What Was In Your Mailbox Today??

Fly-speckers delight, the ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PLATE VARIETIES ON U.S. BUREAU-PRINTED POSTAGE STAMPS by Cloudy French, copyright 1977. 337 pages of pure ecstasy arrived in the mail today!

A new to me used Scott Vol 1 to add to my 2019 vol 3A&B

Just what I need to get me going.

I only look at this topic intermittently as I find lots and lots of images of single unused stamps that are way above my pay grade a bit tedious. So I've only just seen your recent purchase Geoff. This is just the sort of thing I was looking for when I happened to land here! I hope you enjoy it - it certainly looks to have a lot of potential from the outside

Crispin

Crispin - hello, I know what you mean. I try to fund purchases by getting rid of other things. I worked quickly through the easy stuff in the French albums - the modern mint - but most of the earlier material is still sitting there looking at me!

Marker monkey is being exceptionally neat this morning. He brought me ten album sheets of assorted Transvaal stamps, which I will spend the rest of the day sorting through. I could have used the stamps later today if he hadn't been so through.

I received an unexpected surprise in the mail today. A college friend of mine in Scotland was offered three gallon size zip lock bags of stamps and, being a non-collector, initially turned them down. A few days later, after remembering that I'm a collector, accepted them and mailed them to me. They are all off paper and look to be all European from the last 50 years or so. He didn't use stamps on the parcel, though, but I'm not complaining. Sorting through these will give me something to do during this cold snap.

Klein's two volume work on Austrian cancels on the 1867, 1883 and 1890 issues. Found it at HH sales in UK on-line. My thanks to the APRL quarterly magazine which had an article on them. Its in German, but wow.... One volume needs a bit of rebinding, but just glad to find it.

4 bundles of Franco's, looks like the PO kept the 5th one as the letter was ripped apart and in a PO Official envelope. Probably jammed the cancelling machine as the 3 stamps on the cover are uncancelled. So for $1 on ebay I received 400 stamps to look through for nice SOTN cancels. I just love the stamps everybody else hates! No pics because can't get them to work..

The mailman trudged through the snow today to deliver this:

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WORLD WAR II PATRIOTIC LABELS, by Richard Colberg, with excellent images of labels "salvaged from an old accumulation", self-published 2017, available from the author.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

Nells250, your envelope from Poland gives me hope that something I ordered from there should be arriving soon. It looks like yours was postmarked Feb 16th, so yours took just about two weeks to arrive. I think that's about when mine was ordered. Fingers crossed!
And as for stuff that did actually arrive, I got a Zumstein Switzerland catalogue in the mail the other day. It's in German and French but I can figure most of it out, a lot of philatelic terms are French anyway: tete-beche, se-tenant, etc. I mainly bought it to classify a small Swiss collection I bought recently and the previous owner pencilled in some of the cat. numbers that I eventually figured out were from Zumstein.

With good and kind help of ikeyPikey…

Rochlin's Handbook of the Issues of the Jewish National Fund.

Londonbus1

The Chelsea Mass Soldiers Home is right up the street from me so I loved getting this cover:

This was in my mail box today.
I'm showing it mainly because it appears that Austria
has joined all the others who do not cancel stamps
anymore.
This is now the second letter in the last few months
not cancelled whereas before 100% of all Austrian mail
I ever received was cancelled.

Also note the March 1,2019 date on the sticker which paid the additional 30 cents.
Four days is pretty good service.

'
Q/ Did your other Austrian piece bear CVP?

Perhaps the Austrian postal authorities think that postmarks are more to provide proof-of-mailing and a date, and less to prevent re-use of postage stamps, so the CVP does the job ... especially if the destination/routing is already in the bar code.

Perhaps the Austrian postal authorities have decided to stop insulting their customers, and to rely on the honor system ... to protect the sliver of revenue that comes from postage stamps on letter mail.

Perhaps the Austrian postal clerk thought s/he was doing a known hobbyist a favor by throwing the piece in with the outbound metered mail ... which, in the US, once (and still today?) meant that it would bypass the facer-canceler machines.

Perhaps the Austrian postal clerk made a mistake, and threw the piece in with the outbound metered mail.

So many possibilities ...

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey