Stridulation in the garrigue

Autumn eventullay began last Tuesday, the 22nd September. But, sunny Summer kept above Montpellier. Cutting through the garrigue by bike is always wonderful.

Talking of garrigue, a middle school in Montpellier is named after this vegetal form you can find around the place - after you go past houses, lower buildings, higher towers and bars of low-rent appartments. Because it is in the middle of the Heights of Massane, one part of La Paillade's popular area. However I advice you to do a morning visit to take pleasure in the panoramas on the surroundings garrigues in the directions of Grabels and Juvignac (and to see the effects of urban nibbling.

The meter is not pagnolesque at all. Very efficient to know how to keep in touch with the shcool though. What shall we do? Go back to Cannes or encourage the creation of logotypes and personalised stamps by students? La Poste would be happy, but not the school's treasurer.

British online postage

Received yesterday, 23 September 2009, this postage on a Postcrossing card sent in Wales.

The online stamp by Royal Mail (with an airmail-and-commercial label).

We are far away from the illustrative Montimbrenligne online service of La Poste in France. Utility first and for all, even if it lacks the royal effigy, even a crown. The printing adds what you need for an airmail service with a message promoting the online service: "This postage was printed using / www.royalmail.com/onlinepostage ».

A disconnected adress since you are directed on Royal Mail's front page with three entrances: personal clients, businesses or corporations. The online postage is easy to find though.

And quick and efficient: where in three choices and weight. Then, precision of destination if necessary. Her Majesty's Forces are one of the choices ; respect of military duty is not vain in Anglo-Saxon countries. And hop, all the postage solutions are here from the more simple (0.56 pounds like here, around 0.61 euro/0.99 dollar) to the registered insured packets.


Personal touch: I would have preferred a Machin :'(

Meter from Hungary

Printed on 22 November 2007 for a mail sent to France, here is a postage meter from Debrecen, Hungary:
Let's have some Magyar holidays to know if it is a meter from a post office? Are post office meter and private clients meter alike?

Cinephil school postage

15 August-3 September each year, the same song in French media: the start of the school year. From the parents buying supplies to the little one's breakfast filmed on the fatal morning. Courage! One more week and the press will pass to another September habit.

School's intendants must manage their functioning budget, especially the communication expenses: teachers phoning parents, mails to alert parents of absent students, etc. The franking machine helps to control the expedited mail because it has to pass through one of the intendant's personel. Non professional mail will be more difficult to pass through than with disappearing postage stamps.

Gérard-Philippe middle school (collège) in Cannes communicates its pedagogic activities through the meter: film critic it seems. One more clue is on the show-site of the National Education about its involving in the Cannes Film Festival of 2009. A third class (last year of middle school in France) awarded C'est pas moi, je le jure !, a Canadian movie by Philippe Falardeau from a novel by Bruno Hébert, telling the story of an evil boy.

The meter: 0.51 euro, economic rate. Even under the limelight, there is not little savings.

Summer reading brought postal frankings

Sun, bike, garrigue with non-stoppable stereophonic cicadas, chlorined swimmings (I am not fan of marinated fauna), readings, I would almost forget philately. But to receive my order of books with this on the box:

A postage meter printed by Ace Comics' machine, a library specialised in United States comic books.

Cut, this franking is thick for a collection. With a cutter, we are going to slice the board thinly. Put the bottom half to recycling, and the other into the British modernity album.

Spinning out the Head

After October 2008 and the Post and Go machine printed stamps on demand launched in Bristol, then February 2009 and the new security measures:

One of the Machin with security features, the name given in Royal Mail's Stocklist.

If the slits are visible, you have to scrutinize the stamp to see the security printing waves in the name of the postal operator on the blue background (easily visible on the white of the value) and on the royal portrait.

Now, Ian Billings of Norvic Philatelics reports the first day of an experiment. At the Camden High Street post office, starting 8 June, the saint effigy with waves, intermitting slitted frame and simulated teeth illustrates the paper on which postal counter's Horizon meters are printed (the Horizon labels are currently printed on white adhesive paper). Like that:

(Norvic Philatelics blog)

Postal clercks are to use these labels only to stick them themselves on express letters, when consumers will ask for a special delivery service (with arrival guarantee the next day before 9am or 1pm), for 4.95 pounds sterling.

No label are to be given to a client. They must only exist printed with postal mentions and uncancelled (except for the first days produced by Norvic Philatelics et Brian Sinnott), and to be stuck to the departing letter.

If the Camden experiment is successful, many means to mark the payment of a postal service will bear the effigy of Elizabeth II by Arnold Machin.


For philatelic tourists, after the visit of the automated office in Tudor Street, you will go at 114-120 Camden High Street. This Northern Central London post office is located south next to the Underground Camden Town station, around two kilometers north-east from Saint Pancras railway station and at five hundreds meters from the north eastern entrance of Regent's Park. Prepare to send your envelope to an adress in the United Kingdom because only the 4.95 pounds special delivery service is part of the experiment.

Toshiba-dated-again meter

A postage meter saw on a mail from Timbropresse, Timbres magazine's publisher:

In black, Toshiba machine's points can be recognized. The letter was sent on 28 April 2009 and redated on the morrow.

Mail franked with meter must be deposed at a post office the same day. Either the sender put this mail on the 29 April, and the Toshiba date is a correction from La Poste. Or La Poste mail system failed to deliver it on day+1 and confirm the treatment on the 29 April by this second date?

I think the first hypothesis is the correct one. I believed I saw such an example on one of the blogs I regularly read, but, of course in this sort of occasion, I could not put my eyes on it again.

0.54 : priority mail?

Postage meter printed on a cover sent by a French political party:

« La Lettre prioritaire », the French priority service at 0.54 euro, instead of 0.56: error in programming the meter machine? Improved rate for a big sending customer?

Turkish stamp cancelled and completed by meter

This letter was sent from Turkey to France on 24 March 2009. It was franked by a stamp about İzmir of sixty kuruş. Over it, a machine stamp was printed as cancellation and as a twenty-five kuruş franking.

Let's remind that, after 1 January 2009, only the new lira and its "yeni kuruş" (nouveaux kuruş) are circulating in Turkey, after a January 2005 to December 2008 transition with the ancient lira. The conversion was a division per one million, i.e. erase six zeros. Before, the franking would have been of 850 000 liras.

On the Turkey's PTT website in English, the postage rate tables indicates the above 85 kuruş for a less 20 gram letter to foreign countries, around 0.40 euro.

Now, was it posted in Çorlu or in Tekirdağ? As the latter gives its name to their common province, the datestamp must mean "Çorlu, in the province of Tekirdağ".

National Medieval Museum, Paris

A little winter pause (despite I am living in a micro-climate: sunny cold without snow. Vive Montpellier!), let's go to the museum:

Musée national du Moyen Âge in the center of Paris,
near the Place Saint-Michel and along the Boulevard Saint-Germain.

Direct from the printer

New mail bid order until 30 January 2009 at Boule, the 91st sale. New catalogue sent by the printer plant: the Imprimerie graphique de l'Ouest, located in Le Poiré-sur-Vie, in Vendée.

Save money at the office

Firms can save money on their office needs thank to meter machine:

At the Football Association regional ligue of Paris - Île-de-France, covers are still pre-printed while the postal adress appears on the postage meter. Useless personalisation that certainly has a cost.

A good Soccer European Championship 2008 to those who are following it.

Colombia and the future of postage stamps?

Read on the Virtual Stamp Club, a news from Colombia puzzled me. Then, with added comments, it made questions appear.

The Colombian postal operator, Servicios Postales Nacionales, become 4-72, La Red Postal de Colombia (4-72, the postal network of Colombia), understand 4° North, 72° West, approximatively, the geographic coordinates of the country:



Agrandir le plan

Besides the change of brand, a new service will be created: postage stamps will be expected to re-appear in post offices (or agencies part-something part-post offices). Until now, only one philatelic shop, at the minister of Communications, in Bogota, sold stamps to the public!

The post offices existed, but they franked with postage meters. Stamps were available only if the agent (or the client) bought them in Bogota.

On the forum, a United States unhabitant told, but past British and French messages on many forums and magazines concurred: the dream of some postal clercks would be quick and easy postage meter printing machine in post offices, clients ordering postage stamps directly to the postal operator philatelic service, or clients printing their own stamps at home with a web subscription.

Colombian post did it and seemed to be coming back... My hypothesis: the printed meter stamp, a weak ambassador of the country in political difficulties towards its citizens and to the rest of the world?

School blue and Why blue

To know people working in a school helps in retrieving blue postage meters (even if I had to make long and vain explanation how something without a commemorative postage stamps could be useful to me... Only, the technology teacher understood quickly the illustrative logic on a meter).

Here is the result on a single week in March:

These illustrated meters are becoming very common. They are proposed by the machine sellers (read, in French, the ad page of Satas). From top to bottom, you can see here the logotypes of a city council (La Courneuve in Paris suburbs), a sport federation (Seine-Saint-Denis departmental soccer district - guess which teacher received this one?) and one of the main teacher union in France.

For private firms, I have a problem because I have more contacts with teachers than with the administrative part of the school.


But, why are they blue? Laurent Bonnefoy, a French specialist of the meters - he is a membere of the Académie de philatélie, brought back the reason on a mailing list: postal operators judged that blue is the more readable color for the sorting machines. In France, they appear on 15 July 2002 on a first set of franking machine linked to La Poste's servers. The color had been extended to new machines and for new postage contracts. Red is tolerated until the stocks are finished and all machine be connected.

On the Virtual Stamp Club, a question about the Why blue? brought back many examples of color exceptions in United States meter history, whereas Mr. Bonnefoy reminded that the color was decided at the Universal Postal Union. Red until the Beijing Convention of 1999 (RE306 article, point 2.2 for those who could retrieve the text), in application since 2001.


Outside philately, I advice the reading of a little book by French historian Michel Pastoureau: Bleu. Histoire d'une couleur.

Archeology of blue French postage meter

Working on my archives, I was looking for - if I kept them... - the first blue postage meters I received in my mail.

This is the very first illustrated meter in blue I received in September 2005 from an expert. Afterwards, this kind of logotypes in blue have grown in numbers, like you can regularly watch on this blog.

Two marks told more than one

The Institut géographique national (IGN) is the French public service and commerce responsible to cartography French territories. Each end of year, before Christmas, it invites its Francilian clients to a private evening at its Parisian shop, Boétie street, near the Champs-Élysées. While shopping at friendly prices, you are offered appetizers and countries' wines.

2007 invitation came in a squared cover (the scan is partial, the square is too large) and franked with a meter machine. Rate seems to be the "postimpact standard distri", one of La Poste's rates for great number sent of identical commercial mail. Individually, this one cost 0,56 € per cover 50 to 75 grams weight, if 400 units were sent locally (Paris region) or 1000 units if sent nationwide.

I receive this invitation yearly, but this one caught my eye by the IGN's stamp :

"I. G. N. / BUREAU DU COURRIER / SAINT-MANDÉ"

Saint-Mandé is the town where IGN headquarters are located. Vincennes, the post office, is its neighbour.

I concluded that IGN may fear that its mail was seen as spam mail and finished directly to the trash bin. That fear may appear late 2006 or early 2007 when constumers complained that they did not receive the invite while they trash it.

IGN could order a new illustrated meter like the ones I regularly present here.

Action Against Hunger

While I see more and more illustrated postage meters, I am growing impatient to finally see on French mail illustrated cancellation instead of the anonym coded ones.

You see here how the association Action contre la faim is promoting its actions againt hunger on its mail: brand, internet adress, call for donation.

The French Chess Federation

Following a return to the chess game, I received this meter from the French Chess Federation's machine :


About the chess topical collection in French, you can visit thèméchecs, a website that goes beyond the postage stamps.

Elizabeth II on machine stamp, next on postage meter?

Between 1984 and 1985, automates sold stamps which value was printed on demand of the user, in some post offices. The stamp was one like this one:



Queen Elizabeth II's profile is the one used on British commemorative stamps, designed by Arnold Machin from his definitive serie effigy.

There is no machine stamps in this country. This may explain why philatelists are fearing the postage meter, called Horizon labels : available since 2002, they are blank piece of paper with just enough printed intels to post a mail (value, brand, date, number of the printing counter).

Stamp Magazine of January 2008 announced that a new design will be inaugurated in the first weeks of 2008, including a graphic element for security purpose. May the British have better than pale yellow on pale blue design...

Meteorological ad

The pictorial advertisment on postage meter will live long :

In France, really no possibility of cultural or touristic pictorial on new style cancellations?