Big Blue 1840-1940: March 2017

Kimble's April Calendar

Into the Deep Blue
As a collaborative project, Dan and I are presenting a postmark calendar for all 366 possible days of the year, represented by interesting appropriate date cancellation stamps from the Kimble collection.

We are publishing, during 2017, a monthly blog post with the date postmarks for that month for everyone's enjoyment.

The introduction, dedication, and links to the other months that have been published, is included with the January post.

April Postmark Calendar

April 1

Southern Rhodesia 1941 Scott 37 2p dark brown & green

"Victoria Falls"

A small settlement in Masvingo Province, (now) Zimbabwe.

April 2

Austria 1875 Scott 37 10kr blue "Franz Josef"

Altstadt,?

April 3

Belgium 1895 Scott J4 10c orange brown

Glons is a village in the municipality of Bassenge near the southern Dutch border.

April 4

Great Britain 1881 Scott 89 1p lilac "Victoria"

April 5

Canada 1897 Scott 51 1c orange

"Queen Victoria 1837 & 1897"

Brantford, Ontario?

April 6

Trinidad 1883 Scott 70 2 1/2p ultramarine

"Victoria"

Trinidad

April 7

Sierra Leone 1932 1p dark violet

"Rice Field"

Pendembu, Sierra Leone

April 8

Belgium 1900 Scott 66 10c bright rose "Leopold II"

Ruisbroek? several villages in Belgium.

April 9

Belgium 1893 Scott 64 5c yellow green

"Coat of Arms"

Brussels

April 10

Canada 1870 Scott 35 1c yellow "Victoria"

Thessalon, Ontario is on the north shore of Lake Huron.

April 11

Great Britain 1902 Scott 127 1/2p gray green "Edward VII"

Glasgow

April 12

Great Britain 1887 Scott 113 2p green & carmine rose

April 13

Great Britain 1912 Scott 160 1p scarlet "George V"

Pontypool, Wales?

April 14

Sweden 1891 Scott 56 5o yellow green

"King Oscar II"

From "Steamboat Willie" comments...

"April 15t (Edit: Actually April 14) is postmarked "Stockholm 2". The post office was located at "Lilla Nygatan 6" (street) on the ground floor to the left. It looked like this in 1903:"

Stockholm-2

"Yes, and as a curiosity - you can visit the actual house even today in Stockholm. The house was built in the 15th century as the main post office of Sweden and are today housing the Swedish Postal museum. :-)"

April 15

Sweden 1891 Scott 62 30o brown

"King Oscar II"

Fagersta, Sweden in the Bergslagen region.

April 16

Great Britain 1902 Scott 127 1/2p gray green "Edward VII"

Banbury is on the River Cherwell in Oxfordshire, England.

April 17

Austria 1858 Scott 10 10kr brown, Type II

"Emperor Franz Josef"

April 18

Sweden 1925 Scott 172 20o orange

"King Gustav V"

Brod??

From "Steamboat Willie" comments...

"April 18th is postmarked "BRODALEN". Brodalen is in the Lysekil Municipality, in Västra Götaland County. It had 197 inhabitants in 2010.

The post office in Brodalen opened January 1st 1875 and closed March 31st 1970, when it was replaces by a Sub Post Office under Brastad."

April 19

USA 1908 Scott 331 1c green "Franklin"

?

From "Steamboat Willie" comments...

"About April 19th. There are at least ten places called "Stockholm" in the U.S. in several states. SO, I suppose it's anyones guess."

April 20

Canada 1873 Scott 37 3c orange red "Victoria"

London, Ontario

April 21

Austria 1875 Scott 37 10kr blue "Franz Josef"

April 22

Belgium 1900 Scott 66 10c bright rose "Leopold II"

Orp-Jauche?

April 23

Great Britain 1902 Scott 127 1/2p gray green "Edward VII"

Ormskirk in West Lancashire.

April 24

Great Britain 1912 Scott 160 1p scarlet "George V"

April 25

Great Britain 1902 Scott 127 1/2p gray green "Edward VII"

Birmingham

April 26

Austria 1899 Scott 72 3h bister brown

"Franz Josef"

Vienna

April 27

Great Britain 1902 Scott 127 1/2p gray green "Edward VII"

Liverpool

April 28

Belgium 1950 Scott Q330 13fr dark blue green

"Sorting"

Brussels

April 29

Great Britain 1887 Scott 111 11/2p vermilion "Victoria"

April 30

USA 1916 Scott 468 6c red orange "Washington"

France 1900 Scott 117 15c orange

"The Rights of Man"

Out of the Blue
We tried to identify the town/city postmark on the stamps. We were not very successful in some cases. Perhaps the reader could help?

Note: All the stamps are part of the Kimble collection.

Have a comment?

Български пощи

Bulgarian Post

Bud's Big Blue
Bud's Observations

Bob, author of the savvy “Filling Spaces” blog, often asks of advanced BB collectors, “What would you do differently if you were starting over?”

For one, I would learn to transliterate (sadly, translation is way beyond me) from Bulgarian Cyrillic to Latin alphabet equivalents. Sometimes this task is complicated by typeface variations, as on the St Clement, Paisius of Hilendar, and Tsar Simeon stamps, page 6. Further, Macedonian, Russian, Serbian, Bosnian, Montenegrin, and Ukrainian also require transliteration, for these have slightly different alphabetic characters. Not only would learning transliteration have helped me better to understand the subject matter of the stamps, but also the cancellations would have been more readily identifiable. So, I’m trying to catch up. Bulgaria does Romanize some cancels, such as the София/Sofia on the bottom row, page 1, last stamp.

One effect of my not bothering to learn something of Cyrillic is that the Bulgaria BB section filled up without my giving much attention to it. The stamps are plentiful and inexpensive, so feeder albums provided almost all that BB specified. Page 6 was the last to fill up, and 5 lev (лева) postal tax stamp was the hardest to find. I actually bought it from a dealer in Bulgaria.

Census: 314 in BB spaces, 30 tipped-in, 62 on supplement pages.

Jim's Observations
Bulgaria's stamps are really inexpensive, and the Big Blue collector should have a field day.

You might very well have stamps in your collection for which Big Blue does not provide spaces. I found 68 stamps close to the minimum catalogue value that are not included. But Big Blue DOES have ten pages-not bad for this interesting country!

The collector might want to double check the 1902 Battle of Shipka Pass Issue- forgeries abound.

Bulgaria Blog Post and Checklist

Page 1 (Click and enlarge for examination.)