It’s difficult to imagine the wonderful children’s story The Gruffalo was created 20 years ago. To celebrate, Royal Mail have issued six special stamps with colourful illustrations of The Gruffalo characters in a chronological story across two horizontal se-tenant strips of three stamps.
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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 35, England in 1866.
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In 2015 Poland Post issued a postage stamp featuring a particular regional product of the country – cheese. The stamp above has a Korycinski cheese, named after the town of Korycin in Poland. It is thought to be the oldest polish ‘yellow’ cheese.
On the 2017 Bosnia and Herzegovina stamp below is Travnik cheese, which boasts a long tradition, produced exclusively in the region of Mount Vlasic. It is produced using local-breed sheep (Pramenka) and cow (Busa) milk, and the rennet is made according to a secret recipe.
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Climate change, global warming and environmental Issues are, quite rightly, often in the news. I, for one, am more than pleased with the great focus on these subjects nowadays although there are many influential people and organisations that, despite scientific evidence, continue to deny the facts.
I have experienced the terrible winter fogs of 1950s London caused by the effects of widespread coal burning, vehicle emissions and other pollutants which killed thousands and hospitalised hundreds of thousands of people. This experience left me with life-long lung problems.
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This article appears courtesy of Cees Janssen, a confessed Anglophile and one of the main contributors for PostBeeld’s Dutch-language “Postzegelblog”:
After the flood of stamp issues around the Millennium, I chose to limit myself to the stamps of Great Britain printed by Joh. Enschedé Stamps BV in Haarlem, The Netherlands – a small, thematically appealing series. And I was immediately surprised in 2001 with the issue of the greetings stamps.
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An extremely popular event is held each year in the period between Christmas Day and New Year’s Day in The Netherlands. A radio station, NPO Radio 2, hosts a week-long programme playing what listeners vote to be the best 2,000 songs of all time.The following article was written by one of the contributors to our Dutch-language ‘Postzegelblog’ website, Randy Koo:
The polling stations are closed. And for the 16th year the six-minute and six-second mini rock opera song Bohemian Rhapsody (1975) by the band Queen is number 1 in the TOP2000. Meanwhile, a film (biopic) with the same title has recently appeared in the cinema. How did Queen come into being and why is Freddie Mercury so important to the music world?
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The stamp depicted on the left was issued by Ascension Island in 1979 to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the death of the great British explorer, cartographer, navigator and Royal Navy Captain, James Cook.In both of the stamp sets below, James Cook’s chronometer appears. It is, specifically, a marine chronometer made by the man who invented the marine chronometer in 1730. He was Englishman John Harrison (1693-1776). This was the first of a series of chronometers that enabled accurate marine navigation.
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There’s no doubt of the attraction of young animals and the ability of many a young mammal to draw an ‘Ooo’ or ‘Aaah’ from the human being.It can also be the subject of interest to the stamp collector as images of young animals are often printed on postage stamps.
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Though not normally having a great interest in the game of golf I find myself absolutely glued to the television for a certain three-day event which occurs every two years.
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In 1792 a book written by the lady whose portrait adorns the above stamp issued by Great Britain in 2009 became the first book to be published in the English language on the subject of what we now might call feminism.
That lady was Mary Wollstonecroft, whose book “A Vindication of the Rights of Women” could possibly have been influenced by Frenchwoman Olympe de Gouges whose pamphlet
“Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne” (Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the [Female] Citizen), was published in France in 1791. This was written in response to the 1789 document known as the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the (Male) Citizen” (Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen). Gouges’s manifesto asserted that women are equal to men in society and, as such, entitled to the same citizenship rights.
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