The first panda stamp in the world -from my Chinese stamp collection-

Mr. Fukui, a famouse philatelists collecting Chinese stamps asked me if I collect Chinese stamps or not the other day. As a matter of fact, when I decided to start Stampedia project, the base of my collection was what I was given by my father who collected Chinese stamps for a long time. Besides I bought some Chinese stamps in my childhood because it was most cheap stamps at the stamp dealers.

Well I encountered the full sheet of 120 single 1959 Chinese stamps depicting panda besides the facevalue last month and I got it. It was not so popular and I paid only 100 euro. 1963 Giant Panda stamps are much popular and much expensive than this stamp, however this is the first Panda stamp.

So my answer for the first question if I'll collect Chinese stamps is half yes but half no because I'm not going to make a traditional competitive work of Chinese stamps as I don't have enough difficult stamps such as 1897 surcharged stamps or liberation stamps.

 

Greeting card in 1926

Emperor Taisho died on Dec.25th 1925, there are not many new year greeting post card of 1926, however most of the people got used to exchange new year greeting at that time, there are many postcards as substitutes for new year greeting ones. The contents starts with the word "We are in the darkness, but ..."

I started making postal history collection of Japanese post cards as my sub theme recently and I got interested in Emperor Taisho. I met these post cards last week.

Left) Toshima ??/Jan. 5th 1926 Circle Comb Cancellation

Right) Hakodate Jan. 8th 1926 Machine cancellation 

 

What you need in making exhibition works

I've almost completed 70 leaves out of 80 in all for the upcoming national stamp show. I get used to it as it's 5th time for me, however I feel fear sometimes for short of leaves, hinges and so on. I'd like to note something here.

Mount , Hinge and Self-adhesives for covers: you can only get these materials at philatelic store but no stationery store in your town. So you should always try to keep stock of these, otherwise you'll be shocked on the day before the deadline of sending the exhibition work.

Leaves: I make my collection on Pages, Apple software. This is one of the reason I forget the lack of leaves until two days before the deadline. I used to use Frank Goddon leaves before and it took me two months to import it from London just because of out of stock at the dealer. So it is very dangerous to use such leaves, I think.  Even at the international stamp competition, more and more A4 size leaves tend to be used, so I think it's time to changing the leaf size to A4. What is important in ordering A4 size paper at the stationery store is  to order (1) non-acid paper, (2) cream color but white one (3) thick paper (200g / meter square) I got one made in Austria in the stationery store in Ginza, Tokyo and each leaf costs me 20yen= 20cents.

Wraps: You are asked to wrap your leaves by vinyl clear pockets otherwise stamps jump out of the leaves while handling and exhibiting the collections. Stamps dealers have one but I recommend to use stationery store because it's cheaper (30yen=30cents) and easy to get at many places.

As a result, you'd better have enough stock of the materials you can only get at stamp dealers. Regarding all the other materials you should buy at usual stationery store and you should find which store has enough stock.

 

History of the Great Britain Postage Rates

I'm now making a collection which I'll exhibit at the upcoming national exhibition.I'm now researching some postal rates on the covers and I found a website Letter Rates 1840-1968 of G.B. Unfortunately it does not show the international rate of the classic period, so I have to research more....

The shown is an entire letter to U.S.A. franking 1840 Pence Blue, horizontal strip of 4. I'd like to know if 8 pence is a right rate for this letter or not...

1988 Tanzania International Red Cross 125th Anniv. 3shilling 16examples inflation cover ? to Japan

Oct. 22nd 1988  CITY DRIVE DARESSALAAM TANZANIA, Double circle cancellation.

The destination of this letter is The U.N. universtity in Tokyo.

I got it as I thought it's a kind of the inflation letters, however there are also possibility that it is just a letter with many low face value stamps. 

Stamp market

I've been to Marche de Timbres in Paris, Stamp Castle in Shanghai, however there're several stamp fleamarkets in Japan and I've benn to Stamp Market in Tokyo yesterday.
I was offered some covers with arrival machine cancellation and this is one of them, Roman-letter machine cancellation of Osaka. I like this cancellation.


It is also happy seeing friends again at the market and I found one of my best philatelic friends there yesterday of course he is much senior to me. He also offered me a nice international cover with trial machine cancellation of Kojimachi with the destination of Guam, USA.

The last example I show today is a special courtesy cover attached Commemorative booklet. I think it is very rare to attache such stamps on this kind of letters.

Stan deals catalog country has been increased to 31 countries.

 

Today we released our 31st country stamp catalogue of Slovakia and I'm happy to show you our history and the future.

The idea of Stampedia comes to me in 1989 when I met with database technology and at that time I'm not satisfied with traditional stamp catalogues. Since the I've been tried to use paper, Floppy and at last web as a media. I also started listing only Japanese commemoratives at first as I don't have so much money then, however now we're trying to list all the stamps of the world.

We started Stampedia on Dec. 1st 2009 with two country stamp catalogues of France and Monaco, so it's been three years since then and we've been trying to improve the existing catalogues alreadyreleased this year as some of them are in bad quality. Fortunately we've done a lot of improvement including philatelic classification this year and we're still doing it now.

From now on we also try to increse the quantitly. We'd like to have 100 country stamp catalogues by the end of this year and today we released Slovakia.

Thanks to the staff in our project, almost all the stamps are placed in the leaves and scanned and the data was cut into indivudual stamps at Viet-Nam and China by our co-operated company, as a result we possess images of more than 300,000 stamps with 1200pixel high resolutions.

We're the only organization who possess such a high resolution stamp images as well as stamps themselves, so some of the publishers asked us to lend our images for fees, however we have no plan to do so because our aim is to provide "Free Whole Earth Stamp Catalogue" to all the philatelists over the world and not for the other web services aiming to get money.

Last but not least, we'd like to show you our plan of the last half-year. The four big country catalogues will come and those are Japan, Turkey, Russia and Jugoslavia. Many countries became independent from the latter three countries, so it'll help increasing the number of country catalogues. Enjoy Stampedia!