A small selection of stamps added to PostBeeld’s stock recently can be seen below. Please note: for each country featured in the article, there will have been many more stamps added to PostBeeld’s freestampcatalogue.com website.
We begin with stamps from St. Vincent. Saint Vincent and the Grenadines lies to the west of Barbados, south of Saint Lucia and north of Grenada in the Windward Islands of the Lesser Antilles, in the Caribbean Sea. Above is a 5-value set featuring hummingbirds and different varieties of hibiscus flowers. Below three finely illustrated fish stamps from 1976 and a great set of definitives from 1975, also depicting a variety of fish.
Then we have a great selection of mint Official Yearsets from the Faroe Islands, of which three are shown here.
Above and below two mint condition minisheets issued by Gambia in 1991 with wildlife found in that country.
The city of Toledo is located in central Spain, 70 km south of Madrid. It is the capital of the province of Toledo and of the autonomous community of Castile-La Mancha. It was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1986 for its extensive cultural and monumental heritage as one of the former capitals of the Spanish Empire and place of coexistence of Christian, Jewish, and Moorish cultures.
In 2020, the Spanish National Geographic Institute (IGN) celebrate its 150th anniversary. Since its creation on 12 September 1870, it has carried out 150 years of intense work – full of projects, ideas, tasks and results – always with the interest of society at heart, measuring and representing the world that surrounds us. Its work began by determining the shape and dimensions of the Earth, the production of maps and land registries, and management of the official weights and measurements system to end up including, in the twenty-first century, the most advanced technologies in the fields of Astronomy, Geodesy, Geophysics, Cartography and Geomatics. This beautifully designed stamp minisheet was issued to commemorate the anniversary.
Part of Great Britain’s 2023 stamp issuance programme included the stamps seen above and below. Above, six stamps featuring the popular game/hobby Warhammer. Warhammer produces highly detailed miniatures figures that represent the characters and warriors of its settings. Hobbyists use the figures in various ways – by mustering an army for playing games, building and painting the miniatures to create their own scenarios.
Superbly-created colourful graphics for the stamps commemorating the 75th anniversary of the arrival of the ship HMT Empire Windrush in England. The ship is best remembered today for bringing one of the first large groups of post-war West Indian immigrants to the United Kingdom. The ship carried 1,027 passengers and two stowaways on a voyage from Jamaica to London in 1948. Of these, more than 800 passengers gave their last country of residence as somewhere in the Caribbean. The Windrush’s arrival has become symbolic of the generation of British Commonwealth citizens who came to live in Britain between 1948 and 1971.
Michael Bond (1926-2017) was the author of the books introducing the character of Paddington Bear to the world. The ever-popular and instantly recognisable character is depicted on the stamps seen here. Since the first book’s publication in 1958, the Paddington books have sold more than thirty-five million copies worldwide and have been translated into over forty different languages, including Latin. To date three extremely successful Paddington Bear films have been made.
