I Just Got A Bunch Of US Covers With Some Interesting Stamps...

Kimo: I understand your 'out of period' point, but it seems to me that 2-3 years is too small a period of time to matter very much, as it would hardly be unusual to have extra/unused stamps laying about, particularly airmail stamps in the 1920s.

Q/ What do you suppose the 'out of period' price penalty would be? 20%?

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

Both of the covers with airmail stamps on them were sent from Berkeley, CA to Denmark (if I'm reading correctly) from someone with a last name the same as the addressee. This made me wonder if perhaps it was a student, corresponding with family back home. Google turned up this:

https://archive.org/stream/director...ali_djvu.txt

which is a list of graduates from UC Berkeley 1864-1916. There are seven hits on "Hjul" in it, including this one:



Since "m." is always in this document paired with a male name, I'm assuming it means "married." This seems confirmed by a second hit:




I think "2M2" is an OCR error for "2332."

This is far too early for "C.H. Hjul" to have been a student when the letters were mailed two decades later.

Googling further, I found "C.H. Hjul" listed in the Register of the University of California for 1895-96 as a student in the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art. There is also a J.H. Hjul listed in the first document whose wife graduated in the same year. He seems to have been a structural engineer who had a design and construction company in San Francisco. Perhaps they were immigrant brothers who came to the US to study and settled here afterward.

Someone with access to newspaper archives could probably find some other info.

I was hoping to find out enough to further clarify the likelihood of Kimo's attribution of these covers as possibly philatelic. I'm not sure any of this helps.

Are the covers backstamped? What would have been the airmail rate from Berkeley to Denmark at the time, and how close does the franking match the rate? Just curious. I enjoy little puzzles like these.

Basil

Hi! Yes, they are backstamped... I have included back sides scans, too...





I suppose that Mr. Hjul didn't sent to his parents philatelic covers... rarely are those addressed to both husband and wife...