Osiris, TAAF's ship.

When you order beautiful stamps from postal administrations, you can be happily surprised, like this corner from a French Southern and Antarctic Territories (TAAF) stamp sheet. It was issued in 2006, and sold to me by Phil@poste. The French philatelic agency designs and prints stamps of France, and prints French overseas stamps. It has the right to sell the latter in France too, but they have postal value only if use in the oversea territory named on stamps.

The ship here is the Osiris, confiscated in 2003 to illegal fishermen in the TAAF's exclusive economic zone. Since then, she has been patrolling the seas of the French Southern islands againt illegal fishery. The design by Serge Markó is valued on a big-sized stamp and with a good choice of colors.

0,90 € permit to send a letter less than 20 grammes from the TAAF to anyplace in the world (i.e. outside France, French overseas and French former colonies and dependancies).

Below the stamp, a white rectangle is printed with a design, very common n French stamp sheets, to forbid reuse of the paper for fraud (but why not print another line of stamps ?).

The last rectangle bears the date of printing. In general, most of the TAAF philatelic program is issued the 1st of January and is printed during the last summer by Phil@poste Boulazac, in Périgueux.