Guernsey Granite
I have on many occasions placed my feet on the steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London but was not aware until recently that the granite stone used to construct the Cathedral’s steps originated from Guernsey, the British Channel Island.
My discovery of this fact came as I was browsing PostBeeld’s freestampcatalogue.com website and I came across the stamps shown above, issued by Guernsey in 2008. We have previously featured articles on strangely textured postage stamps and the stamps depicted here come into that category.
The beautiful pictographic map by the artist William Henry Jackson seen in this article shows the first United States of America Pony Express mail delivery route, a distance of 1,800 miles, from St. Joseph, Missouri to Sacramento, California. It has an inscription by author Howard Roscoe Driggs which reads:
In the late 1970s a fascinating series of articles written by Mr. K. Kouwenberg about the history of Stamp Collecting, appeared in the Dutch magazine Philatelie. This series has been the source of inspiration for PostBeeld owner Rob Smit to rewrite the history of stamp collecting in instalments. This is Part 27.
Try saying that after a couple of alcoholic beverages!The stamps above from Greece, the “Ancient Greek Coins” set, were issued in 1963. The 50 Leptas stamp has a coin from Syracuse 5th century B.C. featuring the nymph Arethusa surrounded by dolphins and on the reverse side a chariot). The 80L has a posthumously-issued Alexander the Great coin with the god Zeus on the back. Some of the same coins were also on stamps released by Greece in 1959.
Among the hundreds of stamps added daily to PostBeeld’s stock are those shown below in this article.
It seems incredible to think that there are people born during the First World War still alive today. That means they have lived for one hundred years or more. In 2015 it was estimated that there were more than half a million known centenarians worldwide.