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Post Offices: Chiriaco Summit CA

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Whenever we take a road trip out to Phoenix, there's a long drag across the Mojave Desert on I-10.  At the halfway mark there is our favorite stop: Chiriaco Summit.  It has a gas station, diner, gift shop, and a holistic retreat of some kind.  The diner has a big shady patio with tables to sit at, and there used to be 8 to 10 cats there, curled up between flower pots and rocks.  We saw no cats this time -- or last time, now that I think about it -- and the lady at the diner said they don't come around anymore.  That's a shame, because it made it a more cozy spot to stop. There is also a post office. As we sat in the diner, we saw this old photo with a caption talking about how the PO was founded in 1953. We stopped at the actual post office to mail a postcard,  but it is only open a few hours a day on weekdays.  On a Saturday, we couldn't buy a stamp or get a postmark.  The gift shop was surprisingly large, but the PO is just a contract office wit...
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Postmark Office: Lake Montezuma AZ

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On our trip back from Sedona, we got off the I-17 to see some of the back roads.   We tried to recall where we stayed on a trip 3-4 years ago and ended up in Lake Montezuma.  Sure enough,  there was a tiny strip mall with a post office across from a diner, across from the Beaver Creek Inn.  There was a nice little shady park, and since we were there on Halloween, there were events all day and people in costumes coming in and out. The building still says Post Office, but it was a holistic health place and a gift shop.  People said that the PO left years ago, and some online reviews suggest it closed down 5 years ago.   I just had this random quest in my mind where I would send some postcards from small post offices,  but this one fizzled out. It is still listed on many sites, but it looks like the nearest functional PO is up the road in Rimrock.
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Lock Seal Stamps?

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There were a lot of strange revenue stamps and unlisted items in the boxes of stamps I got recently.   Here is something I have never seen before: lock seal stamps. It looks like these stamps would be attached to a lock by the small hole at top and would be officially "used" by pushing a key through the seal into the lock. I looked online for more information.  Eric Jackson, the big revenues dealer, had some Google search hits, but none of these items currently in stock.  Over on stampcommunity.org:  "You can find more on the lock Seals in United States Internal Revenue Stamps Hydrometers, Lock Seals by J. Delano Bartlett and Walter W. Norton published in 1912, reprinted 1982."  And "Springer also lists lock seals". By Springer, they mean this one: " Springer's handbook of North American Cinderella stamps, including taxpaid revenues ": An interesting post about the history and future of that catalog . It looks like these date back to 1875.  A...
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Homemade stock pages?

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There are a lot of creative ways for collectors to organize their collections and hoards.  Here is one I have not seen before in fifty years in the hobby. Someone made pages full of stamp-sized pockets using staples. While this can hold a fair number of stamps, you can't see the stamps, and it doesn't scale well.   What happens when just a few of the pockets start to overflow?  The big issue is that those staples are going start rusting... and that rust will leach into the paper around it,  ultimately causing little brown stains on the perfs of the stamps.  I have seen that small brown stains on perfs many times, but figure it's more likely caused by tape used to seal plastic mounts.  I have heard arguments that these kinds of stains can spread by contact to other paper items.  I don't know for sure.   These are cheap stamps and and I will be getting them off of these pages when I get the chance. 
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Jerome Post Office - Old & New

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At the Jerome Historical Museum in the old Douglas Mansion, they have a closet-sized exhibit of the old Jerome Post Office.   Here is the current PO, up the hill on Main Street. I was looking at photos from our 2019 trip, and the post office looked a lot worse for wear back then: I don't have much to add, just thought you would enjoy the pictures.
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Postmark Picks: Belgian Railways flip-flop

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One of my favorite areas of postmarks to collect are the postmarks on Belgium railway stamps.  They are generally dark and socked-on-the-nose, to the point where they just looked like damaged stamps to most collectors.  And you can find large quantities easily. For a while, their classic ticket-shaped postmarks had some real ambiguity in the year.  This one looks like 1934: But it's really the hour (19) and two-digit year (34).  This one looks odd, as we know there were no postage stamps in the year 947, but "-947" is again the hour and year. If you could trust that this was always the case, you could figure this out at a glance: It would be hour 18, year (19)13.  But it's hard to be sure.  Because sometimes, the year does come first: (19)53, hour 16.  Why?  Pick a format and be consistent.  In case you're thinking it just changed over time, here's one from the same exact year AND hour, flip-flopped: I have no technical data or secrets to sha...
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Postmark Picks: 3-digit years?

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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 ...
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