Let's Get To Know Mouse/Rat

Hi, Vayolene, thanks for the great additions! It looks like that every country has their own Mikey mouse and so that their own Walt Disney, the people who love mice! And by the way , what is a stationery card?

Hi idebee.
A postal stationery card is a postcard with a pre-printed stamp.
Here is a soviet stationery envelope.

"Teremok" (something like "the small house")is a russian folk tale.

A hazel mouse (Muscardinus avellanarius) also called the little dormouse on an earlier page, is very busy in a hazel bush. Beautiful artwork which clearly shows that dormice are not really mice because they have bushy tails and mice and rats in the strict zoological sense do not have bushy tails. 2015

I see! Looks like you collect them. In China, they are mainly used by cancel collectors, because they are issued in great numbers, especially during lunar new year period, and there will be a lot of surplus and then they will be sold at a discount. Like this one , issued 12 years ago, and I see there are still great amount left till this year, but just good for this year's mouse cancels! :-)


A little background info on the stamp design. Chinese characters are hieroglyphs, that is to say , little pictures. In this pre-printed stamp, it's actually the Chinese character for mouse, which pronounces Shu. And the designer changes the upper part of the character into a real mouse head for more fun. The standard character for Shu,is as the first character in the postmark below. And there is another Shu at the bottom, which looks a little different from the standard one. It was used in ancient times and looks more like a mouse with whiskers, legs and a tail.

Two very tiny mice in these japanese and tunisian folk tales

Robert Burns, the beloved Scottish poet, once disturbed a field mouse with his plow. He wrote a poem, saying how sorry he was about what he had done and the last lines of his poem say that man is even more unfortunate than the mouse because he is able to lament about the past and fear about the future. stamp 200 years after Burns' death. The sculpture by Kenny Hunter at the Burns Museum is not "wee"!

(Vayolene, It would be fun to know what the tiny mice are saying!)

Hi,Vayolene, I searched a little and found more on the Japanese stamp. There are three in the set telling an interesting story:
Long long ago, there lived a good-heart grandpa in the mountain. One day he fed a little hungry mouse with his own lunch. The mouse then took him to an underground mouse paradise where the mice treated him with rice cakes in return and gave him a lot of valuable gifts. It's the last one set in a Japanese folktales stamp series.

The hazel mouse or little dormouse (Muscardinus avellanarius) is also native to Sweden, 1985.

Must be nice in mouse paradise!

From a set of 6 stamps (Beatrix Potter's tales)

The German post issues a stamp or even a small sheet for children each year. In 1999 it featured a rhyme about a mouse: "A small mail mouse ran around the town hall, wanted to buy something, had lost its way, schillewipp schillewapp, you are out!" Even the cancellation on this FDC has a short rhyme: "One two, three, you are free!".

But och! I backward cast my e'e,
On prospects dreaer!
An' forward, tho' I canna see,
I guess an' fear!
-Rober Burns

Hi, Kris , Burns' poem reminds me that listening to what the celebrities say about mouse might be interesting! This is the first one comes into my mind. Mr. Deng Xiaoping's famous saying: It doesn't matter if a cat is black or white, so long it catches mice!

This postmark is then full of fun because it cancels the mouse stamp while Mr. Deng is like saying to catch them. :-)

Hi, Vaolene, we have seen so many cute, good , heroic and pettable mice that I almost forget that there are still bad mice in the world! :-)


One Ear, the most notorious villainous mouse in a Chinese Cartoon series : The Black Cat Sheriff.

It's interesting that I see many Chinese mothers complaining that they don't quite understand what the author is trying to say and hard to explain to there children. :-)

Let's see good mouse again! :-)

North Korea issued a set of stamps featuring pet cats in 1991. One of them shows an encounter between a grey tiger and a rat - I wonder if the rat escaped; rats can be very defensive.