First lenticular stamp of France

Here it is : French Post is issuing its first lenticular stamp for the Rugby World Cup that begins at the end of this week, and all the advertisement industry adopts this sport to sell financials, cheese, beef steacks, metro tickets and stamps of 3 € value (normal letter : 0,54 €).

Look for heavy letters from France (exchange of books and reports between science places) or registered letters.

Auto-adhesive, this stamp has two thickness because the animated illustration is constructed with plastic. The right part is platified : be careful with your fingerprints and other little dusts. How this stamp will survive automatic mail sorting, is another story.

Compared to precedent communications documents, the usual signature of the artist Éric Fayolle and of the stamp agency Phil@poste are printed.

Golden Flower in Switzerland

Thank to a Postcrossing, this definitive Swiss stamp arrived at home : its denomination indicates it is valid for a postcard sent to an European country.

A tour inside the Swiss Post website helps to retrieve lots of intels :
* the blue stamp is in the list of valid stamps inside the pdf file "Ordinary stamps 1977+". It was issued in 2002 with another red one, that is valid for a worldwide card. The same year, you can look for one already-seen-on-this-blog insect.
* Europe, Swiss postal rate-ly speaking (.pdf) goes to Russia, Turkey and Greenland.
* The prioritary letter less than 20 grams to Europe needs a 1,30 Swiss franc stampage (around 0,79 € or 1,08 USD). Economic rate is not interesting in this case : 1,20 CHF (0,73 € or 0,99 USD).

A more profound research finds the initial presentation of this stamp : "Special stamps for card sent abroad". These bleu and red stamps are sold in booklet of six, with a discount (0,60 CHF for a six-blue-stamp booklet, 0,80 CHF for the red version). The discount is made possible because these two stamps can only be used for postcards, not letters (read the message inside a booklet).

The illustration is the emblem of the Tourist office of Swiss.

These stamps help greatly the foreign tourists in Swiss, with a discount. We all are not patient or interested enough to take time and discover the philatelic state of a post office during our holidays.

An award for the quality and content of the Swiss Post website.

Post offices and zip codes of the United States

A discovery thank to Don Schilling, this website is trying to compile all United States post office that existed or are still existing. Since the site is partly commercial : you can watch covers on sale cancelled in a particular office.

I found Beverly Hills, California post office, whose zip code became known worldwide with the TV series Beverly Hills, 90210.

The Wikipedia in English can help to discover the secrets behind US zip codes.

Attempt on the King in Montpellier

Great worry in Montpellier, this 5th December 1989 :

This King Francis I - who signed the ordinance of Villers-Côterets in 1539 (450 years before this commemorative stamp) - survived an attempt on its integrity, made with the tumultuous black ink of a pictorial cancellation for the centenary of Montpellier's Institut de Botanique (created by Charles Flahaut).

Printing matters

Ever since I discover philately some fifteen years ago, I keep feeling uneasy in front of printing methods, especially to recognize gravure from offset.

As a Frenchspeaking native, this feeling is stronger for a year and the exploration of the rich but Englishspeaking jungle of British philately.

For the first fear, Dominique of the Blog Philatélie summarizes the differences with, this time, examples of stamps of France personalized with labels: his first article and the second one.

For the British matter, Machin Mania helps thank to the arrival of lithograph-printed Machin stamps inside prestige booklets : to read.

In French, héliogravure is the English equivalent of photogravure (now gravure if a computer replaces the photograph). Lithography is told offset. The trap for a French philatelist is the faux-ami gravure, because, in France, gravure is used in the context of recess-printed stamps, whose illustration is made by an engraver (un graveur).

Postcrossing

Postcrossing is a website that has been helping the exchange of postcards sent by postal ways since 2004.

The principle is simple : you must send a card to another user, writing a code on it to avoid giving your own adress. When he receives it, he records the code on the site. For each recorded card you sent, you can wait for a card to be sent to you by a third user... and so on.

More than 660'000 cards were exchanged since 2004 thank to Paulo Magalhaes' site.

If you don't fancy chance to receive cards, you can go on the website's forum and participate to voluntary exchange depending on countries, card's topics, etc.

Philatelicly, you receive recent stamps of Europe and North America (the technological inegality in the world is visible on the 660'000 card map).

Here are the stamps of the first "official" (i.e. with the help of the blind exchange) postcard I received from Switzerland.


The Switz Post prints the name of the stamp designer and the printer (Enschedé for the insect, Banknote Corp. for the Pro Juventute on the right).

To me, for two weeks, the pleasure to receive cards competes with the one to prepare and stamped cards.

Venetian topic

When a stamp issued March 16th, 2007 about Venice and the Rialto Bridge (and gondola of course), is cancelled with the commemorative date-mark of Venezia Nuova festival, a borough of Livorno, in Tuscany, it prooves that a Venetian topical collection can be something else than a long list of Venitian monuments.

Thank to Riccardo.

100 years of international reply coupons

On the 1st October 2007, the internation reply coupon will be one hundred years old. This is the cause for philatelic magazines to write about its history.

The IRC is bought by the sender at a post office in his country. He put it in his mail to a foreign receiver. In exchange of the IRC, this person will obtain the stamps necessary to send a prioritary letter to the sender.

The collection of IRC is theorically impossible without one postmark, the one from the selling post office. It can be double-cancelled if the receiver keep the coupon without obtaining the stamps, and with a cool postman.

Pierre Sanders tell the history of IRC and give a multi-lingual bibliography in September 2007 Timbres magazine, while Kathleen Wunderly do longly the same in the same month issue of Scott Stamp Monthly, plus the genesis of IRCs and a touch of humour.

After she summarizes the main points of discussion and the initial projects that took place during the 1885-1906 UPU conferences, Mrs Wunderly makes humour : she tried to find IRC in United States now-a-days post offices... A piece of advice : go to a big city post office, where recent or established migrants may be numerous enough to make IRCs an obligated stock in a post office.

For your personal library, Cent ans de coupons-réponses en France 1907-2007 d'André Hurtré ("100 years of reply coupons in France 1907-2007") is published by the Académie de philatélie.

James Baldwin

This morning, I went to the paper's store, and hop, my philatelist eyes - once again - catched something unexpected : the cover of a new novel Lettre à Jimmy by Alain Mabanckou.

The illustrated front cover (Congopage.com website)

Top and bottom, you can easily recognize the two last French definitive series : two red non-value-indicated Marianne du 14 juillet in their adhesive form (watch for the lateral ondulating separations), and one Marianne des Français green (non-prioritary letter).

Full center, an United States stamp about the book's matter : writer James Baldwin (1924-1987). Thomas Blackshear II portrayed him from a 1960's picture. The background adapted a Berenice Abbot's 1938 photograph taken in Harlem, where Baldwin is born. The enveloppe on which the stamp (without cancellation...) is sticked wears the name of a French town : Saint-Paul-de-Vence, near Nice, where the writer dies.

Blackshear is known for his statues inspiring by christian faith and black-american culture, and many stamps for the USPS too. Berenice Abbot is linked to the Lost Generation, these writers and artists who emigrated from the US and came to Paris after World War One.

I admit that my lack of culture (or my hyper-contemporary culture) makes me discover James Baldwin this morning, but I congratulate the marketing service of Fayard editions for doing such a catching philatelic cover.

Good old covers

Here is a good old cover, with everything we need to follow its journey.



1. It was posted in London by Rene Dhondt & Co, on May 25, 1916, and in direction to France. King George V appears on the 2 pence and a half stamps.

Here is the surprise, a mistake on the cancellation date :
A "86" replaced the "16é.

2. On the back, second cancellation without end at the 89 office of London the same day.

3. On the 28th of May, the arrival in Paris is celebrated with the « PARIS R.P. / ETRANGER » mark ("Etranger" = "Foreign")

4. We follow the letter in Paris to the 11th arrondissement of paris (« PARIS XI DISTRIBUTION ») where you can find the Crussol street where destinator mister Van den Bogaert lived.