ScottV Stamps

Here's an odd year format that shows up in a few places and time periods: 3-digit years. In Hungary at the turn of the century (circa 1900), they went to 3-digits years when 1900 kicked in, so here are a few of those: I was a bit surprised to see that it continued into the 1930s.  You would think that after 30 years they would be comfortable with the 1900s and go back to two digits. But it turns up again ... in Italy, in the 1960s.  I have no explanation for these: It was going to be the 1900s for at least two more generations.  So why bring back the digit nobody needed?  Or just use the extra fraction of a millimeter and write the full year ...

Philatelists have always been good at finding new things to commemorate and collect.  There are souvenir covers for first day of issue for stamps, first flights, airport openings, museum events, and we can find other notable events quietly unmarked on cover, such as the first and last days of operation for post offices.  There are even covers for the renaming of post offices. There's an odd series of philatelic covers that I never heard about until I found a stack of them in my Dad's collection after he passed away.  These are "Date Meets Zip" covers.  The idea is that the date matches the zip code.  So each zip code that might possible intersect a valid date will only do so one day in any given century. In other words: Date Meets Zip means that the date (9.24.08) is the same as the zipcode (92408) that day. Here are covers from 92408 and 62907: Over on collectpostmarks.com, they have a Date Meets Zip calendar  but it is suspiciously empty this month. I loo...

At a recent show, we had time to pick through my own boxes of covers.  We put one box together hastily the night before without looking at the covers in any detail.  It turned out that there were some neat items in there... These were covers from a single correspondence, with some creative ones with hand-drawn and collage elements.  One was a heavily illustrated piece of wood.  They all went to John Teagle (alternately Johnny or Johnnie) of Akron, Ohio, who saved them and may have been a stamp collector as well.  They were dated 1981 to 1989. Clearly the senders were artists of some kind, so the recipient would also be a creator of some kind.  One mentions a 1989 concert: "went to see the Dragsters last night (Sunday 19 at CBGB)" and "Dave Janusko met Todd, chatted."  You mean this Dave Janusko ? Another sender was in Florida in 1981, said they heard "the fmodels single (it was really bad) and they went and saw the rockets.  One from Manchester, E...

I always enjoyed seeing the languages of the world on stamps, and this comes up when reading postmarks as well.  In this case, the names of the months are often recognizable, but do vary greatly across even the European languages.  And in other cases there are no letters at all familiar to casual European readers. Here is "April" and "May" in Greek: This is so easily clarified with the Roman numeral for the date: August in French and Belgian:   January in Peru (Spanish): Even with the most familiar languages, you can run into issues with JA (January), JN (June), JY or JL (July).  Those are not always abbreviated the same way.  I just saw JLY for July instead of the usual JUL.  Here is MCH instead of MAR for March on the Isle of Man: I thought I had a pretty thorough knowledge of these, but this one just fooled me: I assumed OUT was the similar to AOUT (August in French), but in Portuguese this is OUT for Outubre (October). Finally, here is an attractive pai...

Considering the 150+ years of postal history and the 200+ postal authorities across that timespan, and the upheavals of history and war, and cultural/local differences, you should expect postal markings to have a lot of variation around the globe.  This has fascinated since my Dad first got me interested in philately 53 years ago. My career has been in programming and database work, so I often see date formats in terms of computer codes and international standards.  The most well known variation in date formats is how the American MM/DD/YYYY (month/day/year) format differs from the European DD/MM/YYYY (day/month/year) format, so November 2,2025 would be 11/2/2025 here and 2/11/2025 in most other countries. Let's get some date codes listed: M = month (one or two digits) MM = month (two digits, leading zero if needed) NN = month name, 2 letters NNN = month name, 3 letters R = month (Roman numerals) D = day (one or two digits) DD = day (two digits, leading zero if needed) YY = tw...

I have listed hundreds of lots of stamps on eBay and Hipstamp in the last 20+ years made up of whole stock pages full of "Postmark Picks."  So, a page of 40 to 60 nice clear town/date cancels from Ireland or Botswana or wherever.  I have been going through them and looking at them in more detail, and I never get tired of the variety of postmark layouts and designs, and the goofs. In the last thousand cancels I copied to their own files, I found a few where one or more digits are inverted.  It's not always clear how this could have happened in each case.  Sometimes, the dates are on a roller of some kind, so you just roll over to the next date with your thumb, which can leave the numbers in between today and tomorrow.  Sometimes, they are flat handstamps where the characters are more freely added and arranged.  Whatever the case, here are some I found interesting: Thatcher,AZ with the whole year (1933) flipped Tombstone, AZ with the year 1939 flipped Woodbur...