USA Post Office Reproductions

These were found in a world Lot recently acquired. The obvious is that these were printed for Stamp Exhibitions in 1980 and 1981 and contain an engraved reproduction of American Postage Stamps. I do have a couple of questions about these. Is this practice ongoing? If so, how many different sheets were created? And how were these distributed? Were they giveaways at the USPS booth or were they for purchase. These are beautifully produced souvenirs and I have seen similar sheets from Austria and I have never managed to find out much about them either.






*** Moved by Staff to a more appropriate forum. ***

They are called US Souvenir Cards.
Don

I think there's a thread devoted to this somewhere. In the meantime, you may find some in here

https://goscf.com/t/16038&whichpage...2Cexhibition

That was fast! Thank you both. Honestly, I do try and search for these things myself but I never seem to be able to find the exact reference that leads me to the thread I want. Live and learn.

They're collectible items, but they are kind of large. Generally, except for the very earliest souvenir cards, their value is not very high. I can't say why the postal service issued these cards as I'm pretty sure the money they received did not go to support the stamp shows connected to them, but to the USPS. Probably they were issued as an attraction for people to come to the show.

If I recall, the stamp images are often (always?) made larger than the real stamps and sometimes the denominations are obscured to make them not postally usable -- or maybe there was another reason for doing that. Yes, they are beautiful engravings. In fact, so nice that a few times I thought of cutting out the engraving and mounting only them . . . but I don't like to mutilate things, so no.

Here is a previous thread about US Souvenir Cards

https://goscf.com/t/59104&whichpage=1

Yes, that's the one I was after!

Kenbarr.com has extensive price lists of souvenir cards and related material. Including illustrations of them.