ScottV Stamps

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...

Here is a neat little thing that happened at the last stamp show we sold at.  It was a slow hour, not many people at our table, so I was going through my own boxes of 50-cent covers looking for items I can scan and list myself.  There was some good stuff in those boxes. Here was a pretty common presentation pack for the 1997 Princess Di set from Great Britain.   I must have seen it a dozen times in the boxes over the years.  This time I noticed there was a piece of paper tucked inside.  Check out this note from a young fan:    I have enjoyed the hobby for a solid 50 years now, and it never gets old, because you never know what be in the next box ... even if you have been through that box many times before.  

Here is an odd PanAm cover from Japan, claiming that due to the International Date Line, the mail could be sent in 1954 and received in 1953 in Hawaii.   The postmarks back up the claim - it was mailed on 1-1-54 and got to Hawaii on 12-31-1953.     There is a faint but interesting cachet explaining how it works.  The mail went on to Fall River MA.  

One of the many ways that philatelists acquire new items is through "circuits" from local clubs or big organizations.  In these, you would receive an envelope with some circuit books in them.  You can take what you want, write your member number in the box where the stamp was, then mark the total value taken, and mail the books to the next address listed on the circuit.  After a while, the circuit books would be retired and sent back to the member who created them with payment for the items sold. I vaguely recall trying some of these from the American Philatelic Society back in the 90s.  The ones I made came back about a year later almost untouched, but I did enjoyed picking through the ones I received along the way.  It doesn't feel like a good way to get rid of cheaper stamps, due to time and costs. I bought a box of these at an event recently.  Some members even had their own rubber stamps to mark the items they kept.  Those were some different tim...

I sometimes get picked on a bit for reusing glassine envelopes and 102 cards a few times.  When I ship things, it's not a big deal.  Maybe the envelope looks a bit funny, but they have the right stamps in them.  But the last few months when we've been doing shows again, we get comments about how this folder says one thing and the label says something else.  I have always reused file folders, years later folding it over and using it again with some other label, or something else written on it.  Comically, when I looked at those folders at the show, I saw their history that no-one else would appreciate.  Some of them were originally used for writing projects back in the 1980s, and some had my Mom's handwriting on them, recycled again and again since the 70's.  None of these were terribly sloppy, we just try to save money when we can and it's easy for me to ignore the old writing, because I know it's not the current info. Last weekend I bought a part of a...