Robot Claw – Page 198 – “Life In The So-Called Space Age”

The Hidden!

February 6, 2021

At the risk of making this a stamp blog, here’s another brief post about something I just discovered. I was reading an article in the latest issue of Gibbons Stamp Monthly about phosphor inks used on stamps. Usually this is so the automatic machines can read the stamps, but it’s sometimes for artistic reasons as well. Apparently it used to be more common, but is still occasionally done today.

So I got the 300+ postcards I’ve received from postcrossing and looked at them under a UV light. Here’s what I found:

Many Russian stamps contain these phosphorescent ‘threads’ embedded in the stamp. They don’t seem to have any sort of pattern and I can’t discern their use for identification or artistic reasons. Even stranger I saw many cases of the same stamps either having or not having them. Weird.

Most Finnish stamps bear a silhouette of the country which, under UV light, is overprinted with the euro sign!

Here’s a Chinese stamp with a hidden UV element connecting various parts of the art. You can also see a number printed in phosphorescent ink on the stamp. This is very common in Chinese stamps, and I don’t know if it is done when the stamp is printed or as some sort of cancellation after mailed.

Cleverly, the UK Sherlock stamp series from a few years ago overprinted a series of words much like how the show used a similar method to show Sherlocks thoughts. As you can see the words are not very vibrant in the above pic, and this may be because the stamp is older. I found for instance that in the case of Russian stamps the ‘threads’ were more distinct on newer stamps so perhaps the inks fade over time?

The best example – by far – that I found on the postcards I checked were on these Chinese stamps, on which you can see the skeletons overprinted in red phosphorescent ink under UV light. It’s extremely clear and crisp, and looks amazingly good. This was actually the very first postcard I shone the light on, and I was both astonished by what I saw and very excited to see what I’d find on others. Alas I soon discovered the UV overprints were rare indeed and never as flashy as this one.

So if you have a UV light and a bunch of older postcards why not shine it on them and see what you can see? There may be a few hidden secrets you missed the first time around 🙂

Train Stamps

February 4, 2021

It’s time for some more stamps! This time, trains:

I didn’t actually choose these when I did my order. I chose another topic that it turns out was out of stock, so (at my request) these were substituted. They were very inexpensive: I think about $3 for 100?

The pack contained slightly over 100 stamps, and I forgot to take a photo of them all together! So here I’ll showcase the stamps from some (but not all) of the countries. They seem to be mostly issued between 1980 and 2000.

As with mushrooms and dinosaurs, almost all of these are CTO stamps, which means machine canceled and unused. They come from the same countries as well; and my guess is very few of any of these were ever sold for actual postage use.

Take Mongolia for instance, a country not known for its rail heritage. The stamps are pretty enough, but the likelihood is they were printed in Europe or the USA under license from some Mongolian government office who likely had nothing at all to do with their design. I wonder could I take these to Mongolia, put them on a postcard, and expect it to arrive?

The same can be said for Burkina Faso:

And São Tomé:

And North Korea:

Cuba is of note since they issued a series of CTO stamps celebrating Japanese bullet trains!?! One can only imagine this was done to market to Japanese collectors:

And of course let’s not forget Kampuchea/Cambodia, which based on the contents of this pack has issued a ludicrous amount of train stamps. Given the then-recent history of that country, I’m slightly surprised ‘they’ issued so many CTO stamps:

The above stamps are from the Soviet Union, and the one on the lower left was used (it’s a real postmark and the stamp has no gum). I assume the USSR issued CTOs (almost every country has) but as far as I can tell the above are all ‘real’ stamps issued for actual postal use. My favorite stamp in the packet is the top left one above, which also happened to be the most monochromatic!

The Czech stamp on the left above has also been used, and at least one (and probably both) of the Romanian ones on the right was as well. Both of these are examples from larger issues, which supports my theory that these are ex-post rather than just bought from a wholesaler.

So in a packet of 100+ stamps it seems only three were actually used. This is not surprising given the nature of the product, but given that trains as a topic ate so popular I would have liked to see a few more examples of ‘real’ train stamps from around the world! My pack of Australian stamps for instance contained several, and the USA has issued well over 100 train stamps during the last 75 years.

Who knows… maybe the next pack of stamps I open might have some trains in it! What will that pack be? Find out next month 🙂