Category: Stamps

Postcrossing 350!

May 2, 2021

Yesterday I received this card, my 350th from Postcrossing:

I’ve been a member now for 28 months, and in that time have sent 371 cards to 42 countries and received 354 from 42 countries. In total 49 countries have been represented, since there’s some I’ve sent to but not received from and vice versa.

People from 248 countries use the service, so I’ve only interacted with about 20% of the possible destinations. The ‘rarest’ for me has been the Bahamas: with only 20 members it was quite unusual for me to have sent a card there! The ‘rarest’ country I have received a card from is the Aland Islands, which has only 33 registered users.

Approximately one third (114) of the cards I have sent have gone to German users, with Russia (46) and The Netherlands (27) next in line. As far as received cards once again Germany wins (with 93 received) and Russia takes second (48) with China third at 21.

I’ve sent enough cards that the duration of international mail can be determined from my statistics, although I expect these are somewhat compromised due to the covid interruptions. That said Australia has an average travel time of 40 days, Japan 15, Germany 12 and the UK only 8. The longest average travel time is Turkey, at an amazing 85 days (based on 4 sent cards)!

The longest time for a receiver to get a card I sent them is still South Africa (115 days) and the shortest was a user in Lichtenstein who got my card only 5 days after I posted it here at my local post office!

For received cards, I got one from Hungary a whopping 175 days after it was posted, and one from Jordan 126 days after. Both of these were long enough that Postcrossing had marked both as lost, but I was able to register them anyway.

It’s not an inexpensive hobby! Each card costs me about $1 on average (including the ones I have printed myself) and international postage is $1.20, so the hobby costs me about $0.96/day on average. The cost is increasing, since as time goes on I can send an ever-increasing amount of cards (I’m at 16 simultaneous now) and I usually always send a new card whenever I can 🙂

Unsurprisingly the vast majority of cards in the last year have mentioned covid and the effect it has had on all our lives. Some have even mentioned losing loved ones or jobs from covid, and in recent months vaccine frustrations (especially from European senders) has also been common. Postcrossers tend to love travel as well, so a common hope is that we can defeat this virus and people can start traveling again.

It’s still a delight getting every card, reading the messages and looking at the stamps. 350 is a lot of cards to have received (I’m ranked about 3500th amongst USA users) but for me it’s just a start 🙂

Insect Stamps

April 17, 2021

It’s time to open the final pack of topical stamps I bought about six months ago. This time, the theme was insects.

The pack contained 100 stamps from about a dozen countries, and as with previous packs I’ve shown here most of them were CTO stamps that were likely never (intended to be) used for postage.

The stamps feature a wide range of insects, although most of them are beetles or bees. I imagine that most countries only depict native insects, but then given the nature of CTOs I suppose they could depict anything!

The usual suspects include this selection from North Korea…

This sheet from Equatorial Guinea (which apparently didn’t even have a postal service when these stamps were issues on their behalf!)…

And these Cuban stamps, which were amongst the nicest of the selection (and only some of the many Cuban stamps in the envelope).

The most common topic by far was bees, and every country represented had at least one new stamp. I expect a collector could put together a nice collection focusing just on bees!

As handsome as many of these stamps are, it’s one against disappointing that there wasn’t even a single used stamp in this set. Insect stamps are commonly issued by almost every country, and you’d think topical collections could easily include a few actual used stamps.

I may have mentioned in a previous post but when I made this purchase one of my choices (cats) was not in stock so they made a substitution and as an apology included an envelope of Disney stamps. I won’t feature them on this blog since they are frankly awful (and all issued by only two countries). I’ll probably just send them to Bernard for a Christmas gift or something…

Japanese Stamps

March 2, 2021

It’s time to open another topical stamp pack, and this time it’s this one:

This envelope contains 100 Japanese stamps and – as with most of the packets I’m going through here on the blog – was purchased inexpensively from a Canadian seller. I was looking forward to opening this one since I knew it would contain mostly postal-used and canceled stamps, and not just the ones printed for collectors like we saw in mushrooms or trains.

The pack contained 102 stamps in total, including one repeat (can you find it above) and one unusual stamp that I didn’t include with the others in the pic. I’ll get to that one in a bit.

As you can see it’s a very colorful selection, and there’s a good variation in size as well. A few seem to be matched pairs from series, but the vast majority of these seem unique.

The above shows the largest and smallest stamps in the pack, both of which show traditional art which seems to be a popular topic of Japanese stamps. There’s quite a few stamps in this selection showing painting or pottery or more unique Japanese forms of artwork like flower arranging or origami.

There’s also a very large amount of commemorative stamps, often released for specific events. Many of these are scientific topics – such as the one on the right celebrating electron microscopy – but there’s also a lot of stamps commemorating organizations like Rotary or the Olympics.

As with most countries the most common type of stamp seems to be based around nature or animals. Despite growing up in Australia I somewhat associate cicadas with Japan now, so this is a fitting example.

Very few of the stamps are dated, but those that are seem to be from the 1960s through 1990s. This beautiful goldfish stamp is from 1966, and shows the high level of detail common to the older Japanese stamps that were in this packet.

Quite a few stamps feature metallic inks, including this origami stamp from 1996. Fancy inks on stamps are always nice, and I know from recent visits (and Postcrossing) that Japan still uses metallic inks quite commonly today.

This was the unusual stamp that I first thought was mistakenly included, but this is actually a Malaya stamp issued during the Japanese occupation of 1943. It’s not canceled: the black inked marking is an overprint applied by the Japanese forces on the native stamps. For all it’s historical interest these are apparently quite common; I suppose there wasn’t much postage being used in Malaya during those few years?

This last pic is of stamps on cards I’ve sent myself from Japan these past few years, and you can see the colorful designs have continued. Japan seems to issue an astonishing amount of stamps, but as a tourist that can’t speak the language its difficult for me to buy them when I visit! That said I’ve tried hard to use a variety of stamps on the cards I send from there, so take a second look at the ones I sent you to see what you got!

This was a good topical pack, and I enjoyed seeing the variety of included stamps. If I could get one, I’d like a second pack of stamps from 2000 onwards (although self-adhesive stamps don’t seem to be collected or sold this way).

In another month I’ll open another themed pack. What will it be? Come back next month to find out 🙂

Robot Claw