Postmark Calendar

15th October (1934)

Canada, Scott #210, 2-cent red brown commemorative issued to honor the 150th Anniversary of the Founding of the Province of New Brunswick, postmarked on this date in 1934 in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan.

TSF Connections: Member madbaker lives in the Province of Saskatchewan, and I acquired this stamp from firstfrog2013 in the TSF Donation Auction earlier this year.

For today I can show both a stamp and a town name that are new to this thread.  October 15, 1991 is the date for this postmark from Kulusuk, formerly known by the Danish name of Kap Dan.  Kulusuk is a small settlement so it's not such a surprise that we haven't yet seen it on this thread - the 2017 population was only 234 people.  The town is the site of an international airport and Greenland's only domestic air route from the west coast to the east coast runs from the capital city of Nuuk to Kulusuk.  The stamp is the high value from a set featuring cultural artifacts, in this case carved wooden masks.



Here's a first day cancel showing an October 15 date.  The postmark town is bilingual on this one, from Jakobshavn / Ilulissat.  Ilulissat is famous for the large quantity of icebergs in the region and the town's name is the Greenlandic word for "icebergs".  The northern hemisphere's most productive glacier in terms of ice volume is the Sermeq Kujalleq which empties into the Ilulissat Icefjord, which has been designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.  We've seen this stamp before - it's a 1981 issue which commemorated the Dorset culture, an ancient northern civilization which has since disappeared from Greenland.



Here's an oddity that I think I've shown elsewhere on this site.  The October 15, 1903 postmark is from Albany in Western Australia and the stamp shows WA's ubiquitous black swan.  Note the perforation inaccuracy on this vertical pair resulting from the comb perforator being struck while the stamp sheet was a bit out of alignment.  Below that I show an image nabbed from Les Molnar's excellent Stamps of Victoria website.  This gives you an idea of how such pairs are created.





Ryan

16th October (1908)

Canada, Scott #98, 2-cent carmine commemorative issued in honor of the Quebec Tercentenary, depicting King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra, postmarked on this date in 1908 in Welland, Ontario.  This stamp is the third value in a set of 8.

This is yet another nice stamp which I acquired from firstfrog2013 in the TSF Donation Auction earlier this year.  Many of my contributions to the Postmark Calendar have been due to Frog's uncommon generosity.  Here's to you, Frog!  Hope that you are well and that we will see you on TSF again sometime soon....

October 17th, 1926





Cover over posted on board steamship Rybinsk to Perm (on Volga and Kama rivers) and addressed to Nizhny Novgorod (mechanical slogan postmark of 18/10). Franked correctly at 8k.

October 18

This re-engraved, 1 penny scarlet, perf. 15x14 King George V stamp (Scott 154; Jan 1, 1912) was postmarked in Harwich, England on this date in what appears to be 1912.

October 19

Alfred Nobel is featured on this 20 öre, red, perf. 12.5 vertical coil stamp issued by Sweden on December 10, 1946 (Scott 380). The stamp was postmarked in Göteborg (Gothenburg) on this date in 1947.

Here's another look at Greenland's tupilaq stamp issue, in this case with a very faint October 19 postmark.  A poor cancel example but I like this stamp design very much.



Qassimiut is a tiny settlement in southern Greenland - very tiny, as its 2017 population is down to 24 people.  It's unlikely that I'll come across too many more stamps from this town!  This 1984 stamp commemorates the 250th anniversary of the founding of Qasigiannguit, originally known by its Danish colonial name of Christianshåb.  Greenland's oldest wooden building is a house in Qasigiannguit originally owned by Poul Egede, a missionary and the son of famed missionary Hans Egede (who is well represented on many other Greenlandic stamps), and the stamp depicts a wooden carving which was placed above the door of the house.  This October 19, 1984 postmark shows the town name using old orthography as "Qagssimiut".



Ryan

Here's another first day cancel meant to be seen on a block of four stamps and I'm lucky enough to have the correct quadrant to see a day & month, October 20, on the cancellation.  This is the 1977 issue which commemorated the 100th anniversary of the birth of Jørgen Brønlund, the doomed polar explorer.  My DAKA catalogue tells me that the town on this cancel was shown bilingually as Jakobshavn / Ilulissat, the town with all those icebergs (and all those sled dogs).



Ryan

21st October (1933)

Canada, Scott #204, 5-cent dark blue, depicting the Steamship Royal William, postmarked in Vancouver, British Columbia on this date in 1933.

From the Scott Catalogue:  "Centenary of the linking by steam of the Dominion, then a colony, with Great Britain, the mother country.  The Royal William's 1833 voyage was the first Trans-Atlantic passage under steam all the way."

This stamp was another acquisition from firstfrog2013 as part of the TSF Donation Auction lot.  Thanks, Frog!

I have another first day cancel to show on an individual stamp but this time we can see the complete date.  It's October 24, 1974 with the city of Godthåb visible (and its Greenlandic name at the time, Nûk, present on the stamp immediately below this one).  That's now known as the capital city of Nuuk.  The stamp is from the first series of Greenlandic definitives to show Queen Margrethe II, who had acceded to the throne in early 1972.



Here's one of the less commonly seen towns that I'm always happy to find among my postmarks.  In this case, however, the town doesn't exist any longer.  Qullissat always had a Greenlandic name but was never a traditional Inuit settlement - in fact, it was a former coal mining town, founded in 1924.  By 1966 the town was the 6th-largest in Greenland, but in that year it was decided to close the coal mine at a later date.  This date came in 1972, and the town was abandoned and its residents relocated.  This block of 4 Northern Lights stamps shows a faint October 24, 1967 cancellation with the town spelled under an old orthographic system as "Qutdligssat".



And finally, I have one match from my small glassines to show.  Emperor Franz Josef is seen on this stamp from Bosnia & Herzegovina from its time as an annexed part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  To the Bosniaks, he was known as Franjo Josip I.  And try as I might, I can't find where Bosnia fits in among Franz Josef's huge list of titles.  Perhaps as an annexed territory, he never got around to formalizing anything - it wasn't too long before Bosnia turned into the flashpoint for World War I.  The stamp bears an October 24 postmark applied in Duvno, now known as Tomislavgrad.



Ryan

October 26

The Fort McHenry flag and fireworks are the design elements on this serpentine die cut 9.5 vertical, multicolored coil forever stamp postmarked in San Francisco, California on this date in 2016. The stamp was issued January 28, 2014 in both coil (Scott 4853 and 4854) and booklet (Scott 4855) form; this stamp is the Ashton-Potter printed coil (4854).



Aerial View of Fort McHenry


Defenders Day Fireworks