ScottV Stamps

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).

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.