Postmark Collections - How Do You Organize Your Postmarks?

An impressive job, Blaamand. I just collect pm from my country, Catalonia a pretty small one: 32.000 sqkm, 7.5 mio people, 950 towns and cities.
I keep my special pm on boxes, one for each territory. From time to time I mount them on self-made sheets, two covers with pm on each sheet.
I Store the cut pms on a stock book.
I've written myself a catalog of my city (Barcelona) special postmarks using the Publisher program. I list them by date stating any relevant information.

As for my Estonia Postal History items, they wait in boxes until I mount them on selfmade exhibition pages.

@Cursus - I like it, thanks for sharing. I am sure even Catalonia postal history alone offers a lot of opportunities for postmarks collector in itself. That is the pleasure with this kind of lunacy - seemingly an endless supply of different postmarks. And the stamps themselves can be 'wortless', it makes no difference.



Excellent! Care to share?

btw - Let me say I really like your city. I have been to Barcelona 4 times, and always want to come back. The atmosphere - probably aided by Spanish wine and ham - is so delightful, I relax so well that I even happen to 'forget' about stamps while I am there. And let me assure you, that does not happen very often

Well, Blaamand, next time that you'll be in Barcelona, you should taste Catalan wines (much better than the Spanish ones!) or our beers. As for the stamps, we still have some brick and mortar stamp shops and weekly stamp markets on the Plaça Reial and on the Mercat de Sant Antoni.
I'll try to copy a page of my Barcelona special pm catalog. I divided it into 2 volumes: 1888/1978 and 1979/2016. The total of special pm is about 1500.
For each I give a correlative number (for each year), what does the pm show (with author and date), date/s of use, what does the pm commemorate, who designed it, who sponsored the pm and where it was used. Plus, off course, an illustration of the pm.

For each volume I wrote an introduction setting the philatelic and political background of each period of time. There's also a general introduction for the whole catalogation.

It's written in Catalan (our national language), but it has a multilingual glossary: English, French, German and Spanish.

I was lucky enough to meet most people that were behind the post 1960 postmarks. So, I was able to compilate the information, before it was too late.

Wow - that project must have been quite an undertaking - I salute you! Would be very interesting to see how you organize the actual postmarks - do you make printouts from the catalog for each different postmark?

Spanish versus Catalan - my mistake, I really should have known to be more precise when chatting with a true Catalan - off course I was enjoying CATALAN wine, not Spanish
Last time I visited Catalunia (not Spain!) - I had actually planned to visit Plaça Reial stampmarket....but I forgot all about it. Outrageous

Thank you very much for your nice words. I, actually, scan most pm from my own collection. For the older ones (pre 1936) that I have "some holes" I use images from my stamp club (Cercle Filatèlic I Numismàtic de Barcelona)magazine, dating from 40 years ago. The quality is not always optimal; but, in my view, it gives a feeling of autenticity.
The first Barcelona Pm, dates from 1888.
I also include a bibliography list.

- Fabulous work Cursus! Thank you for sharing. Now we will know who to ask about Catalun postmarks



I absolutely agree with you on that viewpoint. I have the same feeling - authenticity is more important than the appearance. So, e.g. for postage stamps - I would rather have a damaged postally used stamp - than a CTO or favour cancelled one. The 'proper used' stamp witness about autenticity, while the others appear 'artificial' - in my opinion at least.

Thank you very much, again. Here, nobody cares that much.
But my catalogation only deals with the special pm used on the city of Barcelona, which is not that big. Since some time ago, I'm working on the special pm used on the neighbouring towns (some of them "just across the street), like l'Hosptalet de Llobregat, Santa Coloma de Gramenet, Badalona...This will add about 200 more pm.
If you go to a radius of just 60 km you can easily reach 300 more.
It would be very difficult to do this with the whole of Catalonia. Finding the pm is not too difficult, the chalenge is to find the proper information as some were sponsored by clubs that no longer exist and their magazines and members have vanished.
The problem in Europe is the "too high cultural density".

Yepp, one need to find some sensible limits. Good luck cursus

I don't think I will go into the different or special pm for each town. I aim mainly to plot as many possible places as possible, so for me one of the 1500 Barcelona pm would suffice....but then, how many places around the globe have or has had their own post office?

Cursus, that is pretty awesome. I give you props for taking the time and research to actually compile and create the book that you did.

At last! At last! After all these years I've finally heard from someone else doing what I call my "Gazetteer Collection."! Thanks so much for replying to my intro post.
Since I was introduced to stamps in 1943 or so, I have had all sorts of collections, and the enjoyment for me is in the action of finding new additions to my collections. Sometime in the 1980's I started collecting stamps on which I could read the full DATE of cancellation. I found many others to trade with and for a few years I got plenty of action. BUT...when I got up to about 33,000 dates in my collection I found that I was having to look at many hundreds of stamps before I could find a new date I didn't have and so date-collecting began to pall on me. One day I ran across a Belgian Congo stamp on which I could clearly read the strangely-named city/town where it was canceled. And so I switched to that (worldwide) and have been roaring along for more than 20 years now and will soon hit the 68,000 mark in collectible examples.
To make a long story slightly shorter, I go for stamps on which I can definitely identify the place. I keep every spelling, spacing & punctuation variety of every place. My Holy Grail is a complete, easily readable name on one stamp, but until I find that perfection I will use as space-fillers identifiable partial names, pairs, perfins, etc. I make my own album pages with 19 same-size spaces for stamps and one for the country name. I organize those pages by the present-day country in which that place is now located. For instance, in my Slovakia pages are Bratislava on Slovakia & Czechoslovakia stamps and its earlier names of Pressburg on Austrian and Pozsony on Hungarian stamps.
I've never, ever had more fun with any other stamp collection -- endless action it's like I've visited those places in my mind.

Mr Boom ! (EdziuMM) Let me start by saying I think you've got the coolest avatar around. Welcome again.

I started this thread inspired by your introduction. A pleasure to have others onboard collecting different place names in postmarks. Not even that, you're a veteran while I'm only a novice.

Thanks for sharing your setup for organization. Presume you'll need quite a lot of albums to house them all. That's an awesome collection you got, truly inspiring - congratulations.

My aim is also to only save the fully readable postmarks, however I'll have to allow a little lower threshold for countries where the supply of stamps is not that large, eg Luxembourg that I'm working on right now.

For such countries, a fraction of a name will be sufficient as long as there is only on possibility. I use Excel to search for fractions of names - how do you do this?

I'm also collecting numeral postmarks from those countries that used them, do you?

Do not hesitate to share some of your work!

One resource that I use all the time is the collection of Robert Cragg's British Commonwealth postmark lists hosted on the Philatelic Bibliopole site:

http://www.pbbooks.com/cr1.htm

If I only have a partial cancel, I search the page (control-f) for the letter combination that I have and compare the results to the letter spacing on the cancel. I've identified countless cancels from those lists.

I keep an old Michel specialized Germany around for the lists of post offices and numeral cancels. I can't imagine why they let that information drop out of the catalogues over time.

@Cjd, Thanks, that GB pm site is excellent. I have used those lists as part of the database for each area, the creator did a marvelous job.

I was not aware Michel listed numerals before, what a shame they quit. Anybody knows which year was the last with these lists?

First, let me say that your database/spreadsheets are a fantastic idea that I think must be a great deal of work for you but also an extremely valuable asset. Which countries have you done or are doing? Is there a way in which others of us can access these? Or help you with them?

What is the Excel you use to figure out partial names? I use the Geonames Search of the U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Agency. It's at website: geonames.nga.mil/namesgaz/ Before trying anything there, scroll down to "Feature Designations" and check the first two boxes.

Yes, I have 40 FAT albums for my Gazetteer Collection. I'll send along a pic of the album pages I make after I learn how to reduce it from megabytes down to the forum's size limit. I am, however attaching an illustration of an example of my Holy Grail -- what I would like every one in collection look like.

Yes, I do numeral cancels, but only for the UK, as it's the only country I've found a reference list for.

Carry on!

EdziuMM:

Very nice Victoria cancel. Oh, that there were more so neatly done!

Re: your mention of lists identifying numerical cancels on stamps, there are also lists for France's petit and gros chiffres cancels, see:

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_...e_poste_français_classés_par_oblitération_Petits_Chiffres#La_liste, and

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_...ançais_classés_par_oblitération_Gros_Chiffres

It is my understanding that Prussia used a similar system during the 19th century. Probably, other European countries did too.

Regarding more contemporary numerical cancels, I have begun a collection of German briefzentrum cancels. Here is a list matching their numbers with the corresponding city center.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brief...utsche_Post)

Don