Category: Stamps

Postcrossing Century!

October 19, 2019

The other day I received my 100th Postcrossing postcard! I thought it appropriate to give an update to celebrate the occasion!

In the 10 months since I sent my first card I’ve received cards from 27 countries and sent them to 32. While I have sent cards to Australia, South America and South Africa, I have yet to receive any from there, so I’m still waiting to have a card from every continent (bar Antarctica of course). Here’s the stats:

Cards ‘expire’ after 90 days, which means you can request a new address even if one doesn’t arrive. While the South African one was technically expired, it eventually arrived and was registered by the recipient who lives on a tiny island off the west coast of Africa and said his mail service is sporadic! I’ve had three other expired cards to date, all to Eastern European countries.

You can see Germany is above and beyond the most popular country for Postcrossing, but I have to say I’m most surprised by China. While it’s a bit scary to be given addresses in that country (since it’s difficult to write Chinese characters!) I’ve never had one not arrive so I must be doing ok 🙂

The cards themselves run the gamut, but since I have requested classic tourist cards, animal cards and pinup cards I tend to mostly get those. I’ve made it clear I’m interested in the stamps as well and get a great selection from all over the world.

The Russian scientist stamp is great isn’t it? Germany has a few series of lovely connected landscape stamps and Japanese stamps are always graphic and very pretty. Take a look at the effort this guy put in to cram as many stamps as possible on his card from Japan:

Or these two Chinese cards:

Of the cards themselves I love them all, but some have been particularly notable. I’ll feature two here, both Australian postcards but neither being sent from Australia! This one came from Germany:

And this one from Taiwan:

The latter is particularly great since the card itself is old – maybe 1980s – and I imagine she either found it in her parents collection or in a used bookstore! (And no, there’s no way people sending cards to me would know I am Australian which makes both of these even more amusing!)

These days I can send up to 11 cards at a time, and receive about 10 a month on average. At that rate I’ll get to 200 sometime around next August. Let’s hope at least some of those come from the Southern Hemisphere!

Postcrossing

March 9, 2019

Recently I became a member of Postcrossing, a community of deltiologists that send and receive postcards to each other. It’s extremely simple: you’re given a random address to send a card to, and when it arrives another stranger will get your address and send you a card.

Each card is assigned a code, and when it arrives I enter the code to verify receipt. It’s a simple and effective system.

At first you can only send/receive five at a time but this increases with use. I’m up to seven now. While you don’t have any control over the recipients, you can elect to exclude your country which I have.

At first I wondered if it was weird to send cards to strangers but it’s not at all. I can write about anything and I do, but I often include mundanities such as the weather or what I just ate! Here’s a message that was written to me:

It’s fun seeing people’s preferences (one woman today liked cards featuring buckets, another requested no cards with toucans on them!) and trying to pick cards they like. Mostly though I’ve been sending Albany cards.

Of course another nice aspect of getting cards from all over the world are the stamps! In my profile I’ve requested animal/nature stamps and already people seem to have obliged.

I’ve been doing this only two months and have received fifteen cards. Living in the USA is a disadvantage since it quickly became apparent how slow our mail is. Postcrossing tracks all sorts of statistics that show, for instance, that it takes about 8 days for a card I send to arrive in Germany but 16 days for theirs to arrive here.

Although I’m still relatively new to the service I’m loving it so far. Some users have sent/received thousands of cards! Whether I ever get to that stage who knows, but for now I’m just happy whenever a new card arrives from distant shores 🙂

The Stamp Collector (Final Part)

December 23, 2017

This series turned out longer and more work than anticipated but as we all know, all good things must come to an end.

The largest portion of my stamp ‘collection’ is still affixed to the hundreds of postcards I have stored together in a box. From all over the world and spanning over twenty years, these contain a fascinating selection of stamps and cancellations.

The New Zealand stamps on the postcards sent by Bernard were quite special and varied, but I also like the mini airmail stamp attached to the Swiss stamp and the (very unique!) Death Valley cancellation.

There’s those Star Wars stamps attached to a postcard I sent from Hawaii a decade ago. There’s the only postcard I ever received from Italy (and boring at that) followed by an example of my creative stamping from England.

Those were both from Oz last year, and you may have seen these on your cards? Australia seems to have doubled down on large and lavish animal stamps these past years, and I always seek them out to include them on postcards.

In fact I’ve got no problem whatsoever eating up large portions of the back of a postcard with lovely stamps…. like this:

Which is another specimen I sent KLS last year. I’ve done the above several times over the years, but this one may be my masterpiece!

One thing I’ve learned doing research for this series is that while collectors prefer stamps to be as pristine as possible, there are certain stamps that are more collectible if they had been used for postage. This is why I particularly like the ones attached to my postcards, since they were used to mail stuff to me!

In a few days I’m off to Australia again. This time, when you get your postcards, spare a moment to appreciate the stamps. It’s likely I put as much thought into them as I did the card itself or even what I wrote on it.

I hope you found this series interesting. I ended up much farther down the rabbit hole than I ever expected, and at times even I couldn’t see light, but I’m glad I’m out now and can move on with the usual topics 🙂

Robot Claw