eBay Users Stamp Club meeting this weekend June 20-22, 2014

[abt1950]

Hello everyone.

It's time for our monthly meeting,  This time we're going for the oddbal stuff:    Odds and Sods for show and tell.

Now's the time to show off your oddball collections and the things that tide you over when your stamp budge for your main collection gets tight,  Are you an everything collector who's never met a philatelic item you didn't love?  Do you have things that fit into multipled categories in your collections? 

We'll also be talking about eBay's prohibition on listing items from certain countries?  Does that  affect you as a seller and/or collector? 

The buffet in the Balcony will reflect the meeting's theme.  Sheryll has volunteered to bring chili grasshoppers from Mexico, matchsticks from Australia, and whatever.  I'm bringing chocolate covered ants, a few scorpion delacies, and some fried  17 year cicadas from my freezer, and maybe some prairie oysters.  Drinks will be the usual alcoholic and none alcoholic.  And yes, there will be worms in some of the bottles.

We'll be meeting on the Stamp Discussion Thread, as usual.

Anne in NJ

[greenwave4u]

Odds and Sods is a good "catch all" name for some of my unusual pieces. I do like rummaging at fairs through piles of old covers mainly for my main collecting areas but sometimes items turn up you can't resist. 

Crumpled yes, but I love them and mostly bought for very little just because of the condition and I felt they needed a new home 

Not often you see a large plate block slapped on the back of a commercial cover almost as if it were used to seal the envelope:-

Someone tried to make a colourful symmetry to show off the stamps on this large commercial cover, being large it soon got mashed up:-

[malolo]

Here's my tatty odds & end.

Barmen, german to Luzern, Switzerland forwarded to Emmenbrücke. Postage due uncollected in Luzern Fr1.10, Collected in Emmenbrücke using two 50 centimes postage due and a 10 centime definitive whihc would seem to indicate the lack of 10 centimes PD stamps.

I have no idea what the rate was supposed to be but on the back is an "attachment" of 3,000,000 marks (30x100,000 stamps).

Highest franking I've ever seen. LOL

[malolo]

And here's the back, whihc could not be scanned. A very clever way of attaching so many stamps.

[bwiphilately]

My odd collection is tiny covers, and wonder how they manage to not get lost by the post office.  Here is a tiny Costa Rica mourning cover from 1961.  To the right is a quarter for size comparison purposes.

[sheryll*net]

This one is posted for bwiphilately

A little girl wrote a little letter to her little friend – and made a little stamp to put on the little envelope!

The back is beautiful too!

[jimbo]

One of my long time interests has been 'tiny covers'.  My criterion is that the cover should be less than 10 square inches.  Here are three that I've shown before:
Some Tiny Covers

jimbo

[sayasan]

Top two items out of the odds and sods box:

First, a birthday card envelope from my grandson, with a "stamp" created by my daughter.

Second, a forged GB Machin gold first class used on cover. Annotations by the interceptors at Royal Mail. Actually, I think this may end up on eBay ...

[bwiphilately]

Sheryll - What a lovely little cover.  The contents are the icing on the cake!

Jimbo - My Costa Rica cover is 6.5 sq. in., which is within your definition of tiny.  Your 3.93 sq. in. cover is beyond tiny.  It looks like it is only 2 1/4 inches long.

[jimbo]

The smallest legitimate (albeit philatelic) cover I've ever seen was exactly the size of a single regular issue stamp (US Scott 634 2¢, as i remember, though it's been a long time - maybe in the 60s) on a homemade envelope.  The stamp was on one side and the address and return address were on the other side.  It had a socked-on-the-nose dial from a machine cancel that somehow or other the Post Office managed to apply.  It had every evidence of having gone through the mail.  I've wished for years that I had bought it but at the time it seemed like an extravagance for such an item.

Maresch had a sale which featured quite a few 'tiny covers' used worldwide probably 15 years ago.  There were some very interesting items offered.  They sold for generally good prices.

jimbo

[jimbo]

I just grabbed a pageful of tiny covers and spread them on the scanner.  There's even an unused Civil War patriotic cover in the lower right corner.

jimbo

[jimbo]

And in the 1950s the PO Department decided that tiny covers were a pain in the neck to process with modern machinery so they increased the size.  I've attached a Canadian cover with the slogan cancellation regarding the Canadian prohibition on 'tiny covers.'  Somewhere I have a similar one for the US but I've not taken the time to dig it out.

jimbo

[abt1950]

Very interesting stuff.

Jim,  I didn't know that the US Post Office had set regulations about cover size that early. That would explain why my 3x5 index card postcards never made it to their destinations in the late 1960s. 

Sheryll,   I like that homemade child's cover.   I wonder how many kids still do that kind of thing for holiday cards, etc.

I've got a number of collections/accumulations outside my main interests.  Perfins, precancels, topical stuff relating to ceramics, anthropology archaeology,  glass, textiles, shells, covers and stamps that show the evidence of the senders' artistic impulses,  Oregon stuff, and stamps that ae generall too pretty not to keep in a separate collection.  Also a few birds on stamps, but no magpie as yet.  That's me--the magpie collector.  Most of this is stuff that comes my way in the process of collecting otherf stuff.

But I have a couple beginning accumulations that I'm going after more intently.

This cover is an example, although it also fits into one of my more casual topical collections.  Anyone want to take a guess as to why I picked this up? 

[malolo]

Family business. ); >)

Or you like difficult cancels. LOL

[abt1950]

Yup, you got one of them. I never knew there was such a company until I saw the cover. It also fits into my very tiny textile collection. I knit as well as stamp, so it fits in two ways.

Anne in NJ