Postmarks
I have always been fascinated by the postmarks that appear on the millions of stamps I have seen over the years. Sure, there are patterns and stars and slogans, but it's the heart of the postmark -- the town names and dates -- that fascinate me. Each one represents a piece of mail sent from that exact place at that time, and while mail from big cities like Kobenhavn is common, so often there are small town cancels that I have never seen before and might not ever see again.
For many years I ran a website called PostmarkShop.com where I listed thousands of individual postmarks along with mixtures of postmarks by country. I had about 1500 items all nicely scanned and organized, but I don't think any one of those lots ever sold. I recently broke down the stockbooks from that inventory one page at a time and listed them as mixtures over on hipstamp.com. Here is a look at one of those pages.
Normally, I number all of my lots sequentially, but in this case I had a binder full of numbered pages, and the lots were coded as p1a5 being page 1, row 1 (a), fifth stamp.
For all the talk about collecting postmarks, and my own mild obsession with them, and the thousands I have cherrypicked and bought over the years, they are really a tough sell. Probably because, no matter how many you post, the buyer is going to want some other incredibly specific item.
As an introduction to the topic of postmarks though, that page is a good start. It shows many railway cancels from Belgium (a favorite item of mine), some early numeric postmarks from Great Britain (bottom row) and a range of postmarks from Netherlands Indies, Germany, Denmark and others, ranging from about 1890 to 1960.
Are postmarks rare or valuable?
Some countries like Denmark, Germany, Belgium and Great Britain produce a lot of very fine postmarks. They tend to fit the stamps better and there are so many of them available. For some countries, it is hard to find a decent postmark. Sure, if you have a clipping on paper you can preserve the whole postmark area, but if it's the loose stamp, many countries - especially in Latin America - have postmarks way too big to fit the stamp so you rarely see more than a third of it. Some countries have a lot of very fine postmarks but the stamps themselves are far less common, countries like Madagascar & Belgian Congo come to mind and I always set those aside when I find them. Other countries have the town date portion off to the left of the stamp and only the slogan part hits the stamp - most of the modern USA strikes are like this, so any collection of those postmarks must be complete clippings on paper.
What makes a postmark unique? Town and date would be the broad category. But two postmarks from the same town and day might have different styles (regular mail, parcel, etc). The styles and sizes change over time. There may be slogans as well. Up to a point, every postmark is its own unique little data set. But we can't just save every clear postmark we ever see. How could that ever be organized? I will try to post more of my articles from that PostmarkShop site of mine when I get the chance. And images of all the different ways I have personally organized them.
There is no standard value for postmarks, as there are too many variables to consider. As a rule of thumb, I figure that postmarks after WWII from large towns and cities are a dime a dozen from most countries. Small towns are much less common by their very nature. A million stamps per day probably pass through Paris post offices, but what about a town of 500 people in Iowa? Surely that is thousands of times rarer. My general pricing scheme was that small town strikes after WWII could go for $2 each. Really odd strikes might be worth double. For the 1900-1940 era, common strikes might be 50c and small towns $5. Pre-1900, double that. But in the end, the price is what a buyer is willing to pay. I have no issue grabbing well-struck stamps off of stamp sites for an extra $1 if it's a town I've never seen before.
Those prices don't take the catalog value of the underlying stamp into account. Most stamps are under a few $ each, so I don't feel the need to go laboriously look up the catalog number if we're only interested in the town and date, but for better stamps, you go with the basic catalog price and the postmark adds some percent to that.
I also had a site called PostmarkMap.com back when Google Maps was just starting to find its foothold. This time, I had a few thousand images of postmarks (not just the ones on the other site) linked to latitudes and longitudes, and I enjoyed seeing the maps pulling together on the screen, all the little dots that expanded into postmarks as you clicked them. Other settings let the map display tiny thumbnails of the postmarks filling in the spaces of countries like Belgium, where countries like Malawi were sparse but not empty. I had plans to expand it further. To make it truly useful, I needed way more points on the map, but the idea of one guy trying to maintain and host an archive of millions of tiny images was daunting. With no budget, it faded away. But an early prototype of it can still be found here. I will see if I can reconstruct links to my bigger map projects, but most of those images were uploaded to cloud services I no longer have access to.
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