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©2025 FEPA. All Rights Reserved.
UK & Relevant International Laws Apply.
Main Pages:
Magazine & News:
Events:
Other Resources
©2025 FEPA. All Rights Reserved.
UK & Relevant International Laws Apply.
News from Italy: PHILATELIC VIDEO CONFERENCES DURING THE LOCKDOWN
Thanks to the initiative of Aniello Veneri and the prompt participation of a group of philatelists who used to have a monthly “philatelic dinner” in Rome that was suddenly cancelled because of the lockdown, a regular programme of video conferences is helping to overcome the absence of philatelic events, also at the social level. Each conference is staged using the Zoom platform and is based on a thirty minutes presentation on a specific subject, followed by a Q & A session among the participants. The first conference, on 2 April, was based on Emilio Simonazzi’s talk about Carlo and Emilio Diena and was attended by philatelists from a number of Italian locations as well from New Jersey. Its success resulted in a schedule of new events – one every second or third day – open to anyone interested in attending.
Another conference on 19 April led by Paolo Guglileminetti on the theme of “From the train, with the train” had 38 participants including some from abroad. Impressive!
For information please contact FEPA VP Giancarlo Morolli.
Dutch PostNL legalizes Magazinekaart
As could have been read on Fepanews a year ago the Netherlands has a new type of postal stationery as of January 2019.
It is a standard postcard size (A6) card with an imprinted stamp, meant to be for shipment of the Dutch monthly ‘Filatelie’ in which the Dutch federation and FEPA-member KNBF is publishing their official announcements.
This Magazinekaart was issued by the other Dutch postal operator Sandd. Dutch UPD postal operator PostNL has taken over Sandd as per February 1st 2020 and merged the two companies together as PostNL. This means that Sandd is completely from the market.
The magazine cards were – as was for the year 2019 – produced as a set in December 2018 for the entire year. In 2019 the topic was coat of arms of places where the month after a philatelic event took place. Not only Dutch places, but also abroad. In total eleven different cards.
The theme for 2020 is leap year. Persons (international) born or died on February 29th.
The first two issues were still fully under Sandd operation, as the February issue was already delivered to the postal operator in January.
The March issue was however fully PostNL business. There have been major discussions with PostNL who were not enthusiastic about the idea of having a Magazinekaart as address card for the magazine. It could also cause problems as the sorting centres and machines could not handle these cards with imprinted stamp. As the Magazinekaart was part of the original contract with Sandd, PostNL had to find a solution and now the cards for 2020 (with Sandd imprint) are used together with a PostNL postmark! This will be done for the entire year 2020.
The value of the imprinted stamp is € 2,10 for 2020 and was € 1,55 for 2019.
Design mistakes happen from time to time with stamps and so it happened by the first Magazinekaart of 2020. Designer Annemarie Zijl had made a mistake which one of the keen readers of Filatelie found out. The first person on the card is Alessandro Farnese, Pope Paul III (1468-1549). Born on February 29, 1468. By mistake the wrong Alessandro Farnese (1545-1592) was pictured! He was Duke of Parma.
The wrong and right picture of the Alessandro Farnese.
A new Magazinekaart was produced with the right picture.
Hans Kraaibeek
Postage rate nerd’s lock down hobby
I’ve been locked down now for about four weeks. The premises of the university I work are closed. My days are usually full of meetings and discussions, so working at my kitchen table is no problem, except for my back. I sit down too much.
These difficult times have made me work long days. Running a library with no physical space is not easy. That leaves me little time of my own. But instead of doing sports or other useful matters I have continued working with my computer. My passion is postage rates and spreadsheets.
My current work station.
I love big data. Creating data sets and analyzing them is something which really helps me get focused and forget my work, cleaning and everything else which I really should do.
The mystery of single stamp postal items has puzzled me for years. Would it be possible to find out all possible different single usages of some certain stamp? In order to find this out I started to fill in spreadsheets and calculate the different possibilities.
My test set consists of 38 different denominations of Finland model 1930 definitive series ranging from 40 pennies to 300 markkas. The model was in use from 1930 to 1962. It includes the second world war period and its aftermath with big inflation, which led to many increases in postage rates. This is a real challenge.
My original plan was to calculate all possible rates for the model 1930 definitives found in the book called “Finnish postage rates 1875 – 2001”. In addition to basic rates I wanted to include all combinations of additional fees. These are registration, express mail, insurance fee, cash on delivery, home delivery, advice of delivery, and airmail fee. However, that proved to be a lot bigger task I anticipated. No surprise, I would say.
So far I have tackled the domestic rates. I have been able to calculate about 1,1 million rates, and I assume I am about half way through. If I want to include all foreign and special agreement rates into my research, I estimate I have to calculate close to 10 million rates altogether.
The work is pretty straightforward. First I have to key in all needed basic rates into spreadsheets. The combinations can be calculated with basic functions. The fun part has been to create algorithms for filtering out the single stamp usages. With trial and error I have succeeded to do that.
Spreadsheets may look boring, but they contain a lot of information!
The result so far is that out of all possible postage rates, about 0,5% can be paid with single stamps. Naturally, the most common single usages are the ones the stamps were designed for like domestic letter or registered letter. More interesting cases are combinations of different additional fees. However, these are in most cases theoretical, because these type of items cannot be found in real life.
So what is the use of this kind of research? Very little in practice, it is more like basic research. But at least it gives an idea of the variety of single usages theoretically available. And you never know what implications basic research creates, when other people gets hold of this kind of analysis!