PhilosateleiaNew cover added to American Indian exhibit
Sunday, December 18, 2011 (posted by Philatelius at 8:26 pm)
There’s a new addition to Philosateleia’s featured exhibit 14 Cents: the American Indian Stamp. J. Emory Renoll, a Pennsylvania stamp dealer, mailed this registered cover in 1930.
Read all about the cover and the postage rate it exemplifies.
Camp Douglas prisoner of war cover
Thursday, August 18, 2011 (posted by Philatelius at 10:33 pm)
The American Civil War was one of the darkest and most bloody chapters in our nation’s history. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers died in the fighting that began 150 years ago this past April.
Much of the surviving mail that was sent during the Civil War paints a vivid picture of what life was like during those tumultuous years. An envelope often has a story to tell even if the letter it carried is no longer around. That is certainly the case with my Camp Douglas POW cover.
There’s a bit of a story behind me even owning this piece. A friend of mine worked at a folk life museum/archive, and although the people there had no interest in old envelopes—they wanted only the letters inside—someone fortunately had the good sense to not throw old envelopes away, but rather store them in a box. I had the opportunity to purchase this several years ago, and the rest, as they say, is history.
I hope you enjoy the accompanying writeup about this cover. If you have any POW covers in your own collection and you’d like to share an image with other readers, please let me know.
It’s a hard-knock life
Thursday, February 4, 2010 (posted by Philatelius at 10:02 pm)
Considering the amount of mail the USPS moves each year—more than 200 billion pieces in 2008—it’s fair to say that the vast majority makes it to its destination safe and sound. Every once in a while, however, the mail system chews something up and spits it back out.
Such is the case with this battered and bruised envelope that contained payment for my electric bill.
The folks at the utility company didn’t even bother to open this one up, electing rather to simply return it to me with a note saying my check could not be processed. As the scan shows, the cover is enclosed in a USPS “body bag,” a plastic bag used to carry the remnants of destroyed envelopes to their intended recipients.
Amusingly, the postmarks on the stamps aren’t in much better shape than the cover itself. Someone at the post office apparently inverted the “25” of the date when inserting it into the postmark device, leaving the date upside down in relation to the month and year!
I wrote a replacement check to the utility company, and plan to keep this cover and “body bag” intact. If nothing else, it’s an interesting conversation piece, and one that I would not own had everything gone right.
Do you have any covers that like this one look as though they could tell a war story or two after doing battle in the mail stream?
