Self Adhesive Banana Stamp Of Tonga

Hi

Came across this stamp today. In the lower left portion is a number. Does anyone know the purpose of the number? Is it a serial number or something else?






It took a great deal of restraint to refrain from making some sort of Banana Republic joke.

No idea, best bet a control number.
Tonga's stamps may look gimmicky, but they are used genuinely and often.

I have some others from Tonga that are hard to believe. The designers were a creative bunch. No pun intended.

Some of mine...




I believe this one is postally used...

Nice collection Ringo.
I have a cancelled Pineapple as well.

Yes, probably a control number as they are fairly common.

Not my cover, but this is what I normally see with the banana stamp. Often enough it's just the lowest value overlapped on a cover in freeform placements to fit the envelope:


But I guess bananas do come in bunches.

A cluster of bananas is called a "hand" (for around 10-20 bananas, called "fingers")

The stamp is from a coil strip. See image below from zeeboose.com and note how only every other stamp is numbered.

Applause !
Thanks Glenn,
One always learns something here.

65170

Thanks.

The banana stamps look like those fruit stickers that my 3 year old would paste in his sticker book. Interesting stamps.

Great stamps everyone. Thanks for sharing.

Dianne

Tonga really went wild with the self-adhesives; from the late 1960s to the early 1980s almost every Tongan stamp was a die-cut self-adhesive. They started around the same time Sierra Leone and Norfolk Island started with their fun self-adhesives, but continued longer.

While they started out in all sorts of wild shapes, by the end of Tonga's self-adhesive era, the stamps were usually rectangular with or without simulated perfs.

Some of the sets have designs (maps, pictures) on the backing paper, some only have advertisements or tourism messages. There are collectors who collect the self-adhesives in entire panes, to show off the design on the back. (There are also a few sets that have either a design or an advertising slogan on the back, and specialists keep both varieties.)

There are also examples of stamps issued on the "wrong" backing paper, e.g. the Captain Cook set with the Declaration of Independence on the back (from the US Bicentennial set) instead of tourism slogan. These aren't rare; the Tongan postal authorities were apparently trying to save money, so you see some oddball combinations of stamp and backing paper issued.

Interesting designs!

So these are now classics? Ha! Ha!