Category: Stamps

Mushroom Stamps

December 6, 2020

I had fun with those Dinosaur stamps a few months back, and decided to dip my toes back into the world of ‘topical collecting’. So I made an order at a stamp shop for a few inexpensive packets of stamps in various categories, and over the next few months I’ll go through them here on the blog.

Let’s start right now with… mushroom stamps!

100 stamps cost me about $5. I chose mushrooms because they were cheap and I was amused that they existed as a category (“Why mushrooms?”). It wasn’t clear if the packet was 100 unique stamps or whether there would be doubles. Let’s see:

There were no doubles! In total there were 104 unique stamps from 14 countries: Mongolia, Afghanistan, Benin, Paraguay, Romania, Burkana Faso, North Korea, São Tomé and Principe, Kampuchea (Cambodia), Guyana, Guinea, Nicaragua, Hungary and the Soviet Union (Russia). The country from which I had the most was North Korea, with 12 stamps.

The stamps spanned 28 years from 1968 to 2006. The above example is one of the two oldest stamps and is North Korean. It’s also one of only a small handful that have been actually used, since (as with the dinosaur stamps) almost all of these are CTO stamps made for collectors and machine canceled. Most are therefore still gummed.

There’s a bewildering variety! The above (from Mongolia in 1985) are diagonally printed and very large and some of the prettiest in the packet.

Quite a few were still attached, like these Romanian ones from 1985. Most were illustrations, but there were some photographic stamps as well.

My favourites are probably the stamps from Hungary. Not only do they feature lovely line art, but they are actually textured and the ink seems slightly iridescent. This series contains stamps in two sizes as well, and these bigger ones must have looked lovely on a letter back in 1984!

Incidentally just because these are (mostly) CTO stamps doesn’t mean they weren’t also used for mail. Researching these stamps I found examples of some of them that had gone through the post, so unlike most of the dinosaur stamps it’s likely some of these were used by postal customers when they were released.

So why so many mushroom stamps?!? I’ve learned this is one of the most popular categories for topical stamps, and a catalogue printed only few months ago lists 6144 unique mushroom stamps! So my 104 is only 1.7% of those that exist. It’s a good thing I hate mushrooms else I may be tempted to chase them all 🙂

And so they’ve gone into my album, which still has lots of space left to fill. It’s a good thing I have several packets left to open…

World Postcard Day

September 26, 2020

October 1 is World Postcard Day! This is a celebration of the joy of postcards, and to commemorate the day you should send at least one postcard!

So – this Thursday – grab a postcard and start writing. It doesn’t matter what you write, so write anything! If you’re short of ideas, here are a few:
– Your favorite animal, food, movie, song etc.
– Your goals for the future, or historical achievement you’re very proud of
– Your favorite memory from before the year 2000
– A joke, poem, limerick or lyric

The stamps are important too. Go for variety if you can, or if you’re sending domestically and only need one stamp try for an unusual or pretty one (this means no simple flags if you’re in the US!).

Send the card to anyone, as long as it’s me. Better yet, send more than one to family and friends. Be sure to mention World Postcard Day. And try to get it in the mail on October 1st 🙂

Speaking of cards, this is as good a time as any for a Postcrossing update.

I’ve now received 248 cards and sent about 260. I check my postbox every 2 weeks or so and they keep coming even during the pandemic. The average time for a card to arrive is longer now (in some cases excessively) but so far I haven’t had any of the cards I sent not arrive.

I’ve got a mini-album I use to showcase the favorites I have received, either due to the card, the stamps or the message. I’ve almost filled it and will have to buy another album before too long.

That’s on the back of an Australian card I received where the sender used vintage stamps. I was quite impressed that they used a $0.45 silver jubilee stamp from 1977! Most stamps are good forever, and it would be fun to buy some older US stamps and do the same one day.

I’m showing off the above due to the astonishing penmanship of Grigorii. Also Russian stamps are always very big and very pretty, and there seems to be an endless variety of them. Not every card is lettered this well, and I’ve receive some I could barely read at all!

The above is the most extraordinary card I’ve received so far, from the Aland Islands off the coast of Finland. There’s very few Postcrossers living there so it’s unlikely I’ll ever get another and receiving this was a genuine treat.

I’ve sent to 41 countries and received from 42. Russia, China and Germany are far ahead on the list of sent and received countries, and I still haven’t received anything from South America. I think I’m loving Postcrossing even more now due to the pandemic, and no matter where the card is from I love seeing it in my mailbox.

But of course the best cards are from those we know. Given we can’t travel now you may think there’s no good reason to send one, which is why World Postcard Day is so timely this year. Please consider sending some, but even if you don’t watch your mailbox since you know I won’t let the day pass without sending a bunch myself 🙂

Bag of Stamps (part two)

August 29, 2020

You’ve been waiting all week, and so have I! With no further ado, here are the contents of the dinosaur stamp envelope:

The bag was supposed to contain fifty but had Eighty-two unique stamps (and one double)! In total 13 countries are represented (the number of stamps are listed after): Bulgaria (1), USSR (4), Republic of Congo (5), Hungary (5), Laos (4), Mali (7), Azerbaijan (6), Guyana (9), Romania (6), Tanzania (12), São Tomé (6), Western Sahara (11), Madagascar (6).

The above nine are very large and were issued by the South American country of Guyana in the early 1990s. Apparently they show ‘prehistoric creatures’ that once lived in the country… but isn’t that a koala?!?

Here’s some (presumably?) extinct birds on a series from Laos from 1994. The art on these is very pretty.

And here are seven dinosaur stamps from Mali, from 1984. Curiously most of the art is reused on different-denomination stamps.

One thing every one of these stamps has in common is that they are unused. And yet you’ll notice almost all of them are canceled with postmarks. This is because these are all CTO (cancel-to-order) stamps, which are topical stamps printed for the collectors market. The stamps are canceled (by machine) at the printers and then sold in bulk to resellers as a way to raise revenue for the countries that print them. CTOs like these are apparently much more common in countries without robust postal services, and still exist today.

Researching these I learned that dinosaurs are a very popular theme within stamp collecting with almost 4000 stamps issued across the years by almost every country. The first stamp showing an actual dinosaur was released by China in 1958, and they continue to be popular today with an example being the recent lenticular T-Rex set issued in the USA. I even already had a few myself, that I blogged about a few years ago.

All these stamps – and all the other loose ones that were in the bag or that I already owned – are now in a fancy new binder I bought myself since last weekend. It’s a good way to store them, and there’s loads of empty space left if I ever happen to get my hands on more stamps in the future…

To end this two-part series, I have to say that this bag of stamps that I thought was a risky buy even at $8 ended up being a lot of fun to sort through and research! I hope you enjoyed looking through them with me 🙂

Robot Claw