Open class fun at the Stamp Festival in Montpellier

This article adapted two articles published on the blog in French: the 8th and the 9th October 2016.

This past week end was Stamp Festival in France, with a two item issue on dance: charleston  on 0.70 € stamp and The Swan Lake on a 1.40 € minisheet. In Montpellier, the local federated association organised a free rule exhibition ; a quiet activity compared to the national competition it will host in 2019.

A small municipal exhibit room but interestingly filled (picture under a Creative Commons licence by-nc-sa 3.0 fr).

I got to read again some collections from previous events or from now known collectors. Jacques Rue shared his Type Blanc in traditional philately while Serge Magallon proposed another trip to Ethiopia, this time from the Italian military post during the Second Italian-Abyssinian War (1935-1937) after mail and pictures from missionaries or Ethiopia's first stamps in previous times. For marcophily and regional the president Michel Soulie proposed Montpellier postal history.

A diamond mark from the machine gun company of the Francoist Valvanera Army during the Spanish Civil War (Juan Ara Somahano's collection, Journée du timbre, October 2016).

What was the major piece of the exhibit in my eye? The machine gun on a military mail from a Francoist company, presented by Juan Ara Somohano, that was in competition at Paris-Philex in May. It goes along the RPG thematic I cynically began with the help of French politician Henri Guaino last July.

Consequently, my second reading at Mr Ara Somohano's collection was by the political symbols stamped or cinderellaed on covers.

How to spice up a topical collection? Find the unimaginable stamp that nobody would be looking at (Czech post via tehe World Association for the Development of Philately's Numbering System).

In the other collections, let's congratulate J. Consejo for the post it that directed visitors to three unmissable documents in his bullfighting collection. First how err-horn-eous was the 1995 stamp on the Camargue region. Then the most hidden stamp of the topic: a Czech stamp issued September 2007 to mark the opening of the first permanent movie theater in Prague by Viktor Ponpero. Watch the screen.


The free style permitted by the non competitive nature of this exhibition was highlighted by two open class collections, way outside the Philatelic International Federation's regulations, but quite inspiring for the inventive multicollectors.

With The Civic Life, Michel Rettgen linked many collectibles papers with the aspects of daily life regulated by State and public collectivities: punched weekly tramway ticket from far ago, Mother's Day special national lottery entry, bags for doggy poop...

...

No! Come back: they are crispy unused. They hadn't been cancelled by the user :p

Another member proposed an unlisted one frame of an older collection. The philatelic core is the United States fancy cancels from the 1927-1934 period when stamps on registered letters should not be cancelled with the datestamp. To cancel the stamps, the local postmasters were creative: stars, bugs, music instruments, etc.

How to exhibit such covers, that the collector described me as "very common"?

On top of each sheet, he wrote a sentence of a complex funny "Three Mexicans story" while putting collectibles from the topic of the sentence and the fancy cancel: military badge, dead insects, oblong Chinese coin, and...

... a brothel token when the three heroes decided to cheat on their wives. What collection can be used to illustrate rolling pins? :)

The Charleston stamp by Nancy Peña, engraved by Claude Jumelet (Phil@poste via Phil-Ouest).

Really because I like my non-French readership: here is one of the two Festival stamp. I preferred to look and find some less than 10 euro covers in the boxes of two Montpellier dealers present.


Normmaly I should write you to wait until next October for a new Festival exhibition summary. But, after a revolutionary Autumn transfer, the date of the 2017 Stamp Festival is going back to late Winter, started the next 11 and 12 March.

Already, the number of participating associations was slowly decreasing: 118 in 2012 (the first Festival in Autumn) to 87 this year.

Was the change of date ill-chosen? It would be good to know what French Philatelic Service Françoise Eslinger's arguments were in 2010 when she imposed the change, and what are the current Director and the Federation President argument to change back.

Anyway, can associations manage one public event more in the Spring 2017 competitive calendar?

So: next summary in six months.