Cover Corner: Date Meets Zip

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 looked for the origin story of these covers, only to completely baffle Google: "No results found for "date meets zip" +origin."  The USPS site does announce these regularly.

We were getting a bagel in town last weekend and the headlline of the local paper just randomly announced the upcoming event for 92025, right here in Escondido CA.  Here's the article.




I have never been to one of those events.  I figured they would be so immesurably obscure that they would never turn up in an actual newspaper, much less as a headline.  It sounds like it's not the most serious events one could go to, as it will be "culminating with a silly string salute at exactly 9:20:25".

We will try our best to get there and let you know how it goes.


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