Presentation Booklets

I collect UPU Congress presentation booklets - not too serious about it, but I have a fair-sized pile of them, perhaps 30 or so.  It surprises me how inexpensive they are relative to their issue quantity.  You can often buy them on eBay for prices that reflect the catalogue value of the stamps within, it doesn't seem like the rarity of the presentation booklet makes too much difference to the price.

Classic Canadian UPU presentation booklets, though, are another story.  Some of these were kind of expensive, but then again, so are the stamps within!  I don't see these offered too often, and I have no idea how many have survived.  I also don't know what they're actually worth as they aren't included in the Unitrade catalogue.  Here are 4 old booklets - 1930, 1933, 1939 and 1947.  Tacked on the side is a later copy, from the 1979 UPU Congress.  All of these are photos rather than scans, I didn't want to cause any problems with the booklet spines by opening them too wide.



The insides of the early books are plain, just pockets to hold the stamps.  Fortunately, these old Canadian booklets contain mint never hinged stamps.  Some countries simply stuck their stamps to pages of the booklet, not so cool.  The 1930 booklet contained only the definitives currently in use, the Arch series.  The 1933 and 1939 booklets contained the current definitives plus their back-of-the-book issues, plus commemoratives from those years (there were hardly any of those, only 2 or 3).  The 1939 booklet also had the postage due issues of the day.



These old books predate the usage of mylar strips for stockbooks.  The stamps are held in place by a sort of translucent coated fabric.  I made an attempt at photographing this through a linen test magnifier, it sort of worked out.



The 1947 booklet has descriptions of the stamp designs on odd textured translucent paper.



The 1947 booklet also has a lot more stamps!  Both the War issue and the Peace issue definitives are included, as well as their back-of-the-book issues, all of them in blocks of four.  The black mounts will have been added by a collector at some point, they aren't original, I'm sure.



The 1979 booklet has 5 years worth of Canadian stamps contained within. Such goodies you could get by being a UPU Congress delegate.



Ryan

It appeared to have been the custom for countries to exchange these gift albums at meetings of the International Telecommunication Union and sub committees of that group. This is one of several I have from different countries from this meeting as well as a few other events. This album has 18 pages with stamps of that era nicely mounted as shown. If there is interest I will show the albums from other countries later. The issue I guess is if this is the right location or whether I should create a thread in world wide. 

Post them on this thread and I'll adjust the subject to simply read "Presentation Books."

This is my favourite presentation booklet from the 1960 C.C.I.T.T. conference in New Delhi, India. This one is from Korea with nice effort put into descriptions. The booklet has 18 pages with stamps. I added a few more images for this post. 

These nicely prepared presentation books are from Italy. They are more generic than the others I posted which were prepared for a specific conference. It appears to be an annual booklet that the Italian postal service prepared at that time. One of these is from 1957 and the other is from 1962. Each album presents commemorative stamps of the year. The back of each page gives information of the stamps but only in Italian. The descriptions included in the photos do not actually match the stamps I have shown. I was too lazy to go back and photo the correct ones but at least we can see the detail they put into the booklets.