Category: Stamps

Postcrossing Update

  • November 21, 2025

It’s been about seven months so it’s time for another update on my Postcrossing hobby.

As of today, I’ve sent 1938 postcards and received 1926, an increase of about 300 (of each type) since my last update. My average of about 40 cards per month remains unchanged.

The top countries haven’t changed since my last update – Germany remains #1 – but there’s been a few new countries entering on the low end of the lists. Since April, for the first time, I have sent cards to Bahrain (which took 83 days to arrive) and Chile, and received cards from Chile, Denmark, Macao and Vietnam.

The variety of the cards I’m receiving are the same as always, and you can see a few examples in the above photos. I don’t have a lot of specific card preferences in my request list, and as a result I get a very wide variety of different cards.

I feel like traditional tourism photocards – one of the card types I do mention on my request list – are on the decline. I assume, much like the USA, these are becoming difficult to buy in other countries as well.

There’s been a rise in AI art cards, and I assume some of these are self-made by the senders. AI art for Postcrossing meetup cards is extremely common now as well, and I received way more of them these past few months than in any previous period:

I’ve come to find these a bit impersonal and boring, so I may add to my bio that I’d rather not received them.

The above card was laminated after the stamp was applied and obviously arrived, which makes me feel like trying this myself!

I received the above two cards on the same day, one sent from France and one sent from The Netherlands. While superficially similar the print quality on the left example is better and both came from different printers!

Speaking of advertising cards, the above two are pretty. I’ve got enough advertising cards over the years I could probably do a blog post dedicated to them. Should I?

The above was my very first ‘packaging’ card. It’s not uncommon for users to ask for cards cut from food packaging, and I was surprised to actually receive one. It seems to be a pasta product from Italy (although the card came from Russia) and I took the photo like that to show that the package even has braille on it!

Afterwards, I got the address of a Japanese girl who requested food packaging and said she was a big fan of Wednesday. So I bought some Wednesday cereal and cut a card from the box!

I received six maxicards, which are cards with stamps that match the image. Three are Australian, and the others are from Belarus, England and Estonia.

The Belarusian card had this beautiful postmark!

My three favourites these past months are shown above, all from Japan. The top card features ‘Tawawa-Chan’, the mascot of Kyoto tower, and I believe I’d sent that card to us once myself. The big one on the left shows Ken ‘Matsuken’ Matsudaira and again I’ll possibly do a blog post on him in the future. The rightmost features Sayumi Michishige, ex-member of Hello Project, a Japanese idol band Kristin and I used to enjoy (Yossie was named after a member). The girl that sent the Sayumi card was amazed I knew who it was.

Users still (on the whole) go out of the way to use interesting and varied stamps since most members appreciate that. About a year ago I added (to my bio) a preference for shaped stamps and now I get loads of them! Here’s some examples:

And some more…

And this is only about half of the ones I got these few months!

The above two were the biggest stamps I got this time, and both of them took up over half the card. I wish America printed stamps this large, since I’d welcome the chance to not have to write as much.

For the first time I’ve considered slowing down and sending less, or perhaps taking a break entirely. I’m on the fence though, and will probably continue at least through 2000 sent cards. We’ll see after that.

  • Posted in Postcards
  • Robert

Postcards From Japan

  • February 23, 2025

All told I sent us 36 postcards from Japan, and the reason I’ve waited on this post is that six of them have yet to arrive. I haven’t given up hope since after my last trip a handful of cards took three months to find their way here but I don’t want to wait that long so let’s review a selection of the ones that have arrived today.

Fuji postcards are very common, and it’s extremely likely I’ve sent you one or more over the years. The image of the Shinkansen speeding in front of Fuji is iconic, and I’ve bought and sent many cards depicting this over the years. The bottom left card is one of several 1950s-era Japanese postcards I obtained at a postcard show last summer, and you’ll see several more of them in this post.

Geisha are iconically Japanese, but aren’t exactly common. And yet they still print postcards of them, which I usually buy since they’re colourful and pretty! We saw a geisha in the wild many years ago in Kyoto. She boarded a bus in full makeup and dress, and it was obvious she was a curio even for the locals. The leftmost card shows a ropeway in Hokkaido, and I should have saved it for a future trip…

The graphic Nagoya postcards were found at a post office, which was a relief since I’d had difficulty finding other postcards in that city. The one on the bottom right came from the zoo we visited, and the bottom left one was found packed with a VHS tape in my attic during a recent cleanout. It’s over 30 years old, very flimsy, and I’m surprised it survived the mail 🙂

Every day I sent us two cards, and as usual the messages were usually a general description of what we did that day on one, and some specific incident or event on the second (like what we ate or bought). This may seem mundane, but after doing this for almost two decades it’s fun going back and reading these tiny diaries.

The bottom left one came from the Alice in Wonderland shop in Nagoya with the tiny door we had to squat down to enter. It’s a lovely card and I should have bought more of their unique designs. Postcards are still very popular in Japan and it’s not hard to find good ones, which is why I was puzzled at the apparent lack in Nagoya.

These were purchased from a tiny store in Asakusa that sold mostly photos of celebrities from decades ago. This is a weird type of Japanese shop that doesn’t have a real western equivalent (maybe I’ll blog about one some time) but I was happy and surprised to see they had a small but incredible variety of (dated) pop culture cards as well!

I sent us two lenticular cards, and the Christmas one in the middle is one of them. Sent on Christmas Day, this described the fun we had shopping the otaku shopping district (Osu) in Nagoya. On the right is our new years card. I sent 14 new years cards on January 1, in four designs. Most depicted cute snakes, but as you can see ours didn’t 🙂

As I understand, you’re not technically allowed to mail shaped postcards in Japan. And yet they print them, and I’ve sent many over the years and they all arrive. Gotochi cards (special souvenir postcards sold at post offices) are shaped as well, and I’ve now sent myself two over the years and neither have arrived. I wonder what’s special about gotochi cards that prevent them from being mailed internationally? (The above card isn’t a gotochi, but was purchased from a popup shop showcasing work by the artist.)

Here’s the other lenticular I sent us. It’s massive: easily one of it not the largest card I’ve ever mailed. It’s more than twice as large as a normal postcard, and I put a bunch of extra postage on it just in case. I was very surprised it arrived, and it’s given me the idea of mailing an even bigger – as big as an A4 page! – Japanese lenticular card that I bought years ago.

As for the six that haven’t arrived, I don’t remember what they depicted or what I wrote on them. I number my cards so I can extrapolate when and where I sent them (Nagoya and Tokyo) but can’t speculate why they never arrived when others mailed the same day in the same mailbox did.

And as for the stamps, here are all the unique ones on the cards I mailed us:

Some good stamps here, but I discovered something interesting at the very tail end of the trip so I think the stamps I send from Japan next time will be a lot more interesting…

All these cards are now put into the big binder titled ‘Japan’, which is so full I think I need to start another. And if you’re wondering, yes I left space for the missing six 🙂

  • Posted in Collecting
  • Robert

Cat Stamps

  • August 24, 2024

The other day I received a package from Sue containing over 100 cat stamps! I don’t know the details, but I believe she purchased them from an elderly man selling off his collection. She knew I’d blog these once received, and who am I to disappoint!

Before I begin a brief review: a ‘Cinderella’ is a stamp printed solely for philately, and never intended to be used for postage. These are rarely issued by a government entity; more often made by merchants to profiteer from collectors. Some of these stamps are official in the sense the printer obtains a contract from a country (who receives a portion of sales) but there are also a great deal of fake – illegal if you will – Cinderellas, and it can be difficult even for experts to determine which ones were legitimate and which fake. Some people despise Cinderellas as fake collectibles, but they have their place in philately especially for new collectors, and are still printed and issued today.

As you’ll see many – most? – of these stamps are Cinderellas. But that doesn’t mean they’re not worth perusal. So let me put my detective hat on and start investigating…

All five of the above are ‘illegal’ Cinderellas. The ‘State of Oman’ stamp was part of a series printed by a London forger businessman, the ‘Fujeira’ and ‘Manama’ stamps are fakes labeled with obsolete postal services that are now part of the U.A.E and the Sahara stamp printed by insurgents to raise funds! None of the postmarks are real, and simply printed as part of the stamp design. Cinderellas that are labeled as from African or Middle Eastern nations are extremely common, and these are typical examples.

Here’s another large collection of Cinderellas, this time from Benin (an African nation), Afghanistan and Mongolia (two countries who don’t spring to mind when you think of robust postal services). The Benin and Afghan stamps are catalogued as ‘illegal’ by the United Nations Postal Union (and possible printed by forgers in Hungary) and I suspect the same is true for the Mongolian stamps. Note how similar the postmarks are on the Benin and Afghan ‘stamps’? I speculate they were printed at the same time and place. The source material even looks similar!

Fake Cinderellas continue. The five cat photograph stamps labeled as from Niger were printed in France and have been decried by the UN as blatant counterfeits. Equatorial Guinea is infamous in the annals of fake philately, and these five cats seem to have been printed by a Spaniard and have no connection at all to the country. The last Niger stamp – the WWF Cheetah – is also of dubious origin based on the fake postmark, but I can’t find details online.

I’m not even remotely an expert on any of this, and relying heavily on information I have found online, and as a result I’m going to file all of the above in the ‘probably Cinderella’ category. I’m fairly sure the Cambodian stamps were not issued by the Cambodian postal service, but whether they are illegal or not I can’t discover. The same is true for all the others: Laos, Congo, Nicaragua, Chad, Guinea, Cuba, Azerbaijani and Somalia. On many of these the postmarks are obviously not real, but on others (such as Cuba) it’s a little difficult to tell.

Here we have some examples of what I believe are ‘official’ Cinderellas, which means they were issued either by or with the permission of a government to raise funds via philately. North Korean stamps are a famous example of this – vast quantities of stamps are printed as from North Korea despite it not having a recognized postal service. The Bulgarian ones I wasn’t sure of until I found photographs of examples online with identical postmarks, and Togo is a country known to issue all sorts of non-postal stamps purely for the collectors market.

This block of eight stamps bears the name of Grunay, a never-inhabited island far from the east coast of Scotland. This suggests these stamps are fakes issued by the controversial UK stamp dealer Clive Feigenbaum. These were probably issued in the 1970s and may have even been part of a failed tax scheme. These are the very definition of illegitimate stamps: you or I printing something at home and hand-perforating them would be as ‘real’ as these!

From this point onwards – with some exceptions which I’ll mention – I think the Cinderellas end. Which is to say my imperfect philatelic detective skills suggest that all the remaining are real stamps issued by governments. If you detect otherwise, please let me know 🙂

The top row are stamps from Romania, Vietnam, Hungary and Isle Of Man. The first three are postmarked but unused which suggests they were sold directly to collectors. The Isle Of Man one is real and was mailed on January 10, 1991. The second row are all real used stamps from Zimbabwe, Botswana, South Africa and Czechoslovakia. The last row has two Tanzanian stamps, and two Angolan. The larger of the Angolan stamps is an obvious Cinderella (the postmark is part of the image) but the other is legitimate. I don’t know if the Cinderella is ‘illegal’ or not.

Three Russian stamps and four Indian ones. I believe these are all authentic, but the postmarks on all the Russian ones seem unusually clear and well-aligned which is typical of Cinderellas. It’s also the case that a large amount of Russian fakes exist, often issued by small Russian states. Perhaps these are examples of that?

The top row are all Malaysian, and were issued in 1922 (the two tigers), 1957 and 1979. The $0.01 black tiger stamp is worth about… $0.01 today!

The Cheetah on the second row was issued in 1963 in Mauritania, and this is a wonderful unused example. The Kenya/Uganda/Tanganyika stamp is from 1938 and features the portrait of George VI.

The three on the bottom are the oldest in this pack Sue sent me. All were printed by France for their African territories (Middle Congo) in 1907. The one on the right bears a Cameroon overprint denoting it was for use in that territory.

And lastly but by no means leastly, five examples from Australia. The middle one is notable: a stamp depicting a Cheetah printed in 1994. Some objectors to Cinderellas say that stamps should by definition have some connection to the countries that print them, but Australia has no real connection to Cheetahs! These days countries print stamps of anything they like and the world keeps spinning (and indeed philately is dying), so maybe all those unusual and random Cinderellas aren’t so bad after all?

Before I end, let’s talk favourites. With so many to choose from it was a challenge to select the ones I liked best, but I finally narrowed it down to the above four. The meowing Manama cat stamp is vibrant and large and – even though it’s a Cinderella – would have looked great on a postcard! Similarly for the Azerbaijani Cinderella: I like the detail of the cat portrait. As for the ‘real’ stamps, I have to give the nod to Isle Of Man showcasing their namesake cats on a stamp, and the engraving of the Mauritania Cheetah stamp is incredibly detailed and the stamp is printed so perfectly it makes me wish we still used lithography for stamp printing today!

This post took many hours and I ended up in many rabbit holes dedicated to illegal or otherwise dubious stamps, which ended up to be a fascinating read. Thanks Sue, for the thoughtful gift 🙂