Make room

In May, collectors of France will need more room with thirty nine new stamps.

4 May, Europa issue: French Space Agency CNES's illustrator, David Ducros, propose a view of Saturn and one of an exoplanet. He already produced a stamp in 2007 for the fifty years of human conquest of space.

These two 0.70 euro stamps will be the first Europa issue in the 20 gram postal rate to the European Union countries since 2006, when this rate diverged from the national rate.


Wednesday 13 May, first days at the Jardin d'acclimation, typical place now for stamp collecting families with children and sun bathering in green nature. But, this May will see a change in clients: no Happy Birthday issue will a youth literature topic. A new sort of booklet will be issued with eight postcard-like picture stamps with never changing monuments of France. The rate will be "Monde 20 g" (World 20 grams).

The Holidays booklet continues its chromatical journey, but, this year, I will not follow: how RED it is! A little artificially saturated, no? The booklet - unfortunately - goes to fourteen stamps, including six mini-stamps. I will regret the "Blue" and "Green" booklets, where another colors gave a more relaxed atmosphere from pictures more "as it is". Tennis fans will like two of those stamps.


18 May. Let's blink on the service stamps for the Council of Europe whose headquarters are in Strasbourg. They are not supposed to be used on French mail ^^... They will sell easily because one of them has got the logotype of the sixty year old institution.


18 May. The town of Chaumont chose its stamp after a design competition: no monument, no sightseeing. You have to look for the poster printing to understand why Frank Vriens' project was chosen. The stamp will be issued during the first week of the twentieth International Poster and Graphism Festival.


On 25 May, a little tour to the protestants with a five hundred anniversary stamp on Jean Calvin.

The Club philatélique de l'Élysée get two first days of sale and eleven new stamps for its first show at the Pavillon Gabriel, right next to the Élysée Presidential Palace.

First, a-no-ther map of the Mediterranean Sea for the Euromed Postal conference. It is a topical meeting of the Euromediterranean Partnership, boosted last July 2008 into the Union for the Mediterranean (the one with the stamp that makes waters go up). The first conference was organized by La Poste in July 2007 (autopromotion?), the second in Alexandria, Egypt on 24 and 25 May 2009. That is the meaning of the rays of light refering to the lighthouse of Alexandria. This stamp surely pleases people outside the philatelic range, but it made the Black Sea, the Red Sea and the Atlantic Ocean disappeared... Now, this time, the stamp that makes water go down!

The big issue will be a chocolate bar though. It smells like chocolate. Pierre-André Cousin illustrated the ten bits with illustration like sculpted on chocolate bar. But they are ten stamps telling the story of cacao from South America to Bayonne, France in 1609.


Even without the odor, the Chocolate minisheet is to be seen for its design... Let's hope Phil@poste will not begin to sell chocolate bar looking like the stamps in post offices (the price will be awful). On the opposite, I bet that the Club philatélique de l'Élysée will certainly find a Parisian chocolatier to imitate the minisheet and offer a tasting to a Presidential neighbour passing by.

The rest of May issue interest me not, but Chaumont if I was interested in poster art.