ScottV Stamps

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...

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...