Postal History

LOMBARDY-VENETIA FORGERIES TO DEFRAUD THE POST OFFICE
(FALSI PER POSTA)
The stamps of Lombardy-Venetia were not only the first to be issued in Italy, they were also the first to be forged.  In April-May 1853, Gaetano Alberti, nicknamed “the Count”, a Verona-based forger, produced a few thousand counterfeit recess-printed 15c and 30c stamps. In September the gentleman was arrested and sentenced to two years in jail.
In 1857-1858, well-executed letterpress forgeries of the 15c, 30c, and 45c were produced by an audacious, but circumspect Milanese forger who was never apprehended. His strategy was to print small batches and then work on a new “imitation”. This resulted in two different types of forgeries of  the 15c; three types of the 30c; and six types of the 45c. The higher the denomination, the more the tracks-covering tactics induced the forger to prepare a new forgery.  In two instances, the postal authorities in Verona issued detailed circulars to the various post offices warning them about the Milanese forgeries, as well as giving clues and characteristics which would help in the detection of the counterfeits.
It is quite ironic that the excellent workmanship of the engraver of the Milanese forgeries and his penchant for perfectionism were ultimately responsible for the detection of these nearly foolproof imitations. The engraver painstakingly copied the design in its complex details, but he reproduced the coat of arms on the chest of the double-headed eagle to perfection overlooking a couple of microscopic details which the Viennese engraver had executed in a mediocre fashion.

In December 1933 the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) appointed the Reverend Harold Wilde as pastor for the island of Tristan da Cunha (Tristan). His role also encompassed that of Administrator and Postmaster. In this, the second of three articles on Tristan, we look at 1935 Silver Jubilee stamps on covers mailed from the island.

Entre 1701 et 1703, au début de la guerre de Succession espagnole, Henry Bentinck (1682-1726), vicomte Woodstock, et son gouverneur huguenot, Paul Rapin de Thoyras (1661-1725), entreprennent un voyage pédagogique – le Grand Tour – qui devait les conduire de La Haye dans les Provinces-Unies à travers les États allemands jusqu’en Italie. Nous éditons la centaine de lettres connues de la correspondance qu’ils entretiennent au cours de ce voyage, avec le père du jeune homme, Hans Willem Bentinck (1649-1709), comte de Portland. Ces lettres apportent des informations sur tous les aspects de la vie quotidienne des voyageurs – sur les coutumes des Cours et des villes où ils séjournent, sur les bruits qui couraient à l’époque sur les événements de la guerre, sur les contraintes du voyage, sur les aléas du courrier et sur les rapports personnels difficiles entre les trois correspondants. Notre introduction porte sur ces différents aspects de la vie des voyageurs et sur la notion de « vie privée » que véhicule la correspondance. Nous ajoutons à ce corpus deux lettres inédites de Rapin-Thoyras à Woodstock de l’année 1721 ainsi que plusieurs lettres d’aristocrates qui envoient à Portland leurs commentaires sur le comportement de son fils.

Michaël Green est chercheur à l’Université de Lodz en Pologne, et chercheur affilié au Centre d’études sur la vie privée [Centre for Privacy Studies] de la Fondation Nationale danoise de la Recherche à l’Université de Copenhague. Ses travaux portent, entre autres, sur les minorités religieuses à l’époque moderne, sur l’histoire de l’éducation et sur la notion et la pratique de la vie privée. Parmi ses publications : The Huguenot Jean Rou (1638-1711): Scholar, Educator, Civil Servant (Honoré Champion, 2015), et les articles « The Orange-Nassau Family at the Educational Crossroads of the Stadtholder’s Position (1584 – 1711) » (2019) et « Bridging the English Channel: Huguenots in the Educational Milieu of the English Upper Class » (2018).

Traduction de l’anglais original de l’introduction et de l’apparat critique par Bertrand Marceau, maître de conférences en  histoire moderne à l’université de Reims.

The development and use of mail on the Pacific Coast Railway from 1875 to 1934 in San Luis Obispo County, California is illustrated through examples of postal history, historic photos and a map. RPO postmarks are shown as they changed through the years.

This article presents the way in which the French territory was gradually equipped by the network with the roads with Horse Post. The study was undertaken by using GIS. The most important elements are the growth of the density of the network, like its complexification in time. These evolutions are studied on a French territory scale, initially by analyzing the morphology of the network, then by observing the great distributions. The result shows forms and methods of divergent growths on the territory.

Art historians have long looked to letters to secure biographical details; clarify relationships between artists and patrons; and present artists as modern, self-aware individuals. This book takes a novel approach: focusing on Albrecht Dürer, Shira Brisman is the first to argue that the experience of writing, sending, and receiving letters shaped how he treated the work of art as an agent for communication.

In the early modern period, before the establishment of a reliable postal system, letters faced risks of interception and delay. During the Reformation, the printing press threatened to expose intimate exchanges and blur the line between public and private life. Exploring the complex travel patterns of sixteenth-century missives, Brisman explains how these issues of sending and receiving informed Dürer’s artistic practices. His success, she contends, was due in large part to his development of pictorial strategies—an epistolary mode of address—marked by a direct, intimate appeal to the viewer, an appeal that also acknowledged the distance and delay that defers the message before it can reach its recipient. As images, often in the form of prints, coursed through an open market, and artists lost direct control over the sale and reception of their work, Germany’s chief printmaker navigated the new terrain by creating in his images a balance between legibility and concealment, intimacy and public address.

One of the more challenging topics within the subject of Auxiliary Markings is Jusqu’à marks. The commonly-seen mute, parallel purple bars are but one type of Jusqu’à mark. Jusqu’à marks are important for both the questions they answer and – perhaps more frequently – the questions they raise with postal historians. To a large extent this is because there are no standards or regulations concerning the use of these marks. Indeed, the Universal Postal Union (UPU), which describes itself as “the primary forum for cooperation between postal sector players” does not once mention this term on its website.

Within a postal context, the French word “Jusqu’à” generally is considered to mean “as far as” or “up to”. Jusqu’à bars by themselves can have multiple meanings, but all seem to suggest that the request for airmail service, as indicated by an airmail etiquette or airmail stamp, was either partially or completely unfulfilled.

In this paper I provide a fully illustrated study of the various uses and versions of Jusqu’à markings.

This project aims to investigate how the postal services translate themselves in their logos, since it is a common service to multiple regions of the world with a similar historical origin. Supporting itself in areas of study such as postal history, elements of the postal universe, geography, geographic and cultural history of particular regions, the concept of logo, research methodologies and visual organization, semiotic notions and colour theory.

It also explores the application of research and organization of information methodologies relating to the postal logos, as well as the analysis of particular cases of graphical information mapping methodologies which served as a basis of influence in the creation of the Postalogos website, which gathers, archives and maps the international postal logos in a platform, categorizing them according to geographical elements – continents and Europe’s special territories – and graphic elements – symbols, colours and typography.

According to the results observed on the website through the categorization and comparison of the logos, a critical analysis of the logos was made in which speculations and observations are exposed about the values that postal services transmit intentionally or not through the use of certain symbols such as birds, coats of arms and letters and certain colours like blue and red.

The essay focuses on the postal services at Trento and the nearby stations during the eighteenth century, and outlines the history of the Taxis Bordogna family, who had been in charge of their management since the sixteenth century. There are three fields of investigation: the events affecting the lineage, and the changes in the administration of the postal fief; the management of the postal system and the communication routes; the relationships between the Taxis Bordogna family and the authorities of the Prince-Bishopric of Trento, the County of Tyrol, and the Hapsburg Monarchy.

Il saggio è dedicato al tema delle comunicazioni postali a Trento e nelle stazioni limitrofe nel XVIII secolo e descrive la storia della famiglia Taxis Bordogna che, già dal Cinquecento, le amministrava. Il testo si articola su tre piani di indagine: le vicende interne al casato e i mutamenti nell’amministrazione del feudo postale; la gestione economica delle poste e le vie di comunicazione; i rapporti della famiglia Taxis Bordogna con le autorità trentine, tirolesi e imperiali.

For the past 30 years, the Tristan da Cunha overprints on the 1935 Great Britain Silver Jubilee stamps have both fascinated and attracted collectors. They have been labelled bogus by some as they were not legal tender, yet they have commanded increasingly higher prices when coming to auction. The reason for this interest is not clear, but one suspects it has something to do with the mystique of Tristan. In this last of three articles about Tristan da Cunha and the 1935 Silver Jubilee issue, we provide some background history to their production and sales. Finally, we will discuss the finding of a forged overprint which has come on to the market in the past two years.

As a leading Muslim thinker, 'Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulusi of Damascus creatively engaged with the social, religious, and intellectual challenges that emerged during the early modern period in which he lived. Yet, at a time of high anti-mystical fervour, his Sufi-inspired views faced strong local antipathy. Through extensive correspondence, presented here for the first time, 'Abd al-Ghani projected his ideas and teachings beyond the parochial boundaries of Damascus, and was thus able to assert his authority at a wider regional level. The letters he himself selected, compiled, and titled shed fresh light on the religious and intellectual exchanges among scholars in the eastern Ottoman provinces, revealing a dynamic and rigorous image of Islam, one that is profoundly inspired by humility, tolerance, and love.

Postage stamps are used mainly to certify that a postage fee has been paid, but they have less obvious uses. Postage stamps are used by governments to send out ideological messages to its citizens and to those of others countries. The receptions of those messages will depend not only on the intentions of the state that releases them, but also on other factors directly involved with the receptor. Those factors would range from literacy to income.
Postage stamps issued by any state reflect the way its government wants it to look like in the eyes of its own people and to those of foreign countries. A state chooses very carefully what to show and what to hide in its postage stamps depending of the results it wants to achieve.
The messages conveyed on postage stamps are the result of the combination of text, numbers and images. To combine text and image in different ways may result in a wide range of meanings. Those meanings could depend on the functions that the text used will acquire once combined with an image. (“Anchorage” and “Relay” functions defined by Roland Barthes.) Also, the images used to convey the messages sent out by stamps are obtained quite often from other artistic disciplines. Some of the iconographic images used on stamps, despite of being antique, could adapt –on stamps- its connotations and contents to the needs of the moment thanks to what Aby Warburg described as “energetic inversion”.
For Franco’s regime, postage stamps were a symbol of sovereignty, carriers of historical and spiritual values because they were an expression of autonomous national entity. Franco’s regime through its “National Iconographic Scheme” (5th of July of 1944) tried to shape the image of Spain that was shown on postage stamps. This scheme established a series of preferences about what should and what should not be shown on stamps and how it should be shown.

Auxiliary Markings are a very complex topic of study, with some philatelists estimating that upwards of a million markings exist. Of all the columns I've written, perhaps no other topic has elicited as much feedback and interest.

Numerous authors have struggled to present an approach to organizing Auxiliary Markings. For marcophilists (collectors of Auxiliary Markings), several taxonomies have been designed, but none of them strike me as meeting the needs of postal historians.

The Mastering Postal History column in the Kelleher’s Stamp Collector’s Quarterly 3Q, 2017 issue is titled “The Role of Auxiliary Markings in Postal History Part 2”.

Scroll for English. Dal 9 al 16 febbraio 2006 nella Camera dei Deputati è stata organizzata la mostra «Il Regno d’Italia nella posta e nella filatelia», con la mia cura scientifica. La mostra affrontava gli aspetti storici, postali e filatelici d’Italia dall’Unità (1861) alla fine della monarchia (1946). La mostra si sviluppava in 84 quadri che, insieme, sviluppavano un discorso organico sul tema. Ogni quadro conteneva un testo storico e filatelico e documenti postali che lo illustravano. Questo volume è il catalogo della mostra: è diviso in 84 capitoli. Le illustrazioni e le didascalie sono le stesse della mostra; il testo è uno sviluppo e un approfondimento di quello dei quadri. Quindi, questo volume non è solo il catalogo della mostra ma è un testo autonomo, che sviluppa in modo discorsivo ma rigoroso la storia della posta e della filatelia nel regno d’Italia. Il libro è diviso in due tomi (capitoli 0-41, 42-83). Qui i capitoli 35-37.
From the 9th to the 16th of February, 2006, an exhibition of history of mail and of philately has been held in Rome, in the House of Parliament, and named «The Kingdom of Italy in the mail and in philately». I was the curator. It dealt with the historical, postal and philatelic aspects of Italy from unity (1861) to the end of monarchy (1946). The exhibition was developed on 84 frames which, as a whole, formed an organic and consistent discourse on the theme. Each frame contained a historical-philatelic descriptive text, stamps and postal documents illustrating it. This book is the catalogue of the exhibition: it is divided in 84 chapters. The illustrations and their captions are the same as in the exhibition; the text is an expansion and deepening of the one in the frame. So the book is not only the catalogue of the exhibition, but it stands on its own, with a lasting value, telling in a discursive but rigorous way the history of the mail and of the philately of the Kingdom of Italy. The book is divided in two volumes: the first contains chapters 0-41, the second chapters 42-83. Here the chapters 35-37.

SAMER AKKACH ED., Letters of a SufiScholar: The Correspondence of 'Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulusi (1641-1731) Islamic History and Civilization, vol. 74 (Brill: Leiden and Boston, 2009). Pp. 560 (Arabic and English). $ 211.00 cloth.The monograph under review contains a critical edition of seventy-two letters received and written by the famous Damascene Sufiand polymath 'Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulusi (1641-1731). In the introduction, editor Samer Akkach describes al-Nabulusi's correspondents as "Arab and Turkish friends, colleagues, mystics, highranking officials, and individuals unknown to him, all residing outside Damascus in various cities of the region" (p. 1). The letters deal with a wide variety of issues, from the finer points of the Muslim creed, to God's role as the ultimate cause of natural causes and human actions, to the unitive/monistic metaphysics of Ibn [al-]'Arabi (d. 1240) and his school of thought, to holy war, to religious ethics, to the permissibility of certain substances (e.g., tobacco and coffee), and so on. To help the reader to locate al-Nabulusi's correspondents geographically, the editor provides a map and a list of "Places, Towns, and Correspondents" (pp. 75-78). The book is divided into the English text that contains the editor's introduction and summary of some of the letters and the Arabic part that features an Arabic version of the English introduction and a critical edition of the Arabic text of al-Nabulusi's letters. In what follows I will be quoting passages from the editor's English introduction to the book.One should point out that the letters were carefully assembled by the author himself under the title Wasa'il al-ta?qiq wa rasa'il al-tawfiq, which the editor translates as "The Means of Truth-Seeking and the Letters of Providential Guidance" (p. 1). This fact indicates that al-Nabulusi valued these letters enough to take the trouble of copying each one of them (either by his own hand or by hiring a scribe) and collecting them under one cover. The editor provides a helpful account of possible reasons for al-Nabulusi's concern for the preservation of the letters for his posterity as well as the culture of private correspondence in his age in general (pp. 21-31). He also describes the author's intellectual milieu and personal religious and philosophical predilections (pp. 32-34).For those familiar with Akkach's earlier works, especially his 'Abd al-Ghani a-Nabulusi: Islam and the Enlightenment (Oxford: Oneworld, 2007), this collection will serve as a documentary sequel of sorts. Its purpose, as I perceive it, is to marshal textual evidence in support of Akkach's understanding of the beginnings of an Islamic "enlightenment" and intellectual emancipation that he has detected in the intellectual legacy of some Muslim thinkers of the late Ottoman epoch ('Abd al-Ghani a-Nabulusi, pp. 69-75), including al-Nabulusi, Hajji Khalifa (1609-1657), Evliya Celebi (1614-1682), Ibrahim Muteferriqa (d. 1745), Ibrahim Haqqi (d. 1780), and 'Abd al-Mannan (d. after 1779). Akkach's musings about the Islamic variant of the European Enlightenment are not the primary subject of the present volume, but, it is worth mentioning here that Akkach has discovered signs of al-Nabulusi's broadmindedness and tolerance (conceivably, an intellectual attitude indicative of "enlightenment") in his advocacy of Ibn [al-]'Arabi's doctrine of the unity of being (wa?dat al-wujud), his defense of human free will versus divine predetermination of all events, as well as, somewhat more controversially, in his approval of the public consumption of tobacco and coffee. In regard to wa?dat al-wujud, Akkach seeks to demonstrate the subtlety of al-Nabulusi's interpretation of this doctrine as opposed to what he considers to be a much cruder and confrontational approach to it taken by Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328). As someone who has written at length about Ibn Taymiyya's criticism of Ibn [al-] 'Arabi's monism and its impact on the subsequent polemic over his intellectual legacy in my Ibn 'Arabi in the Later Islamic Tradition, (Albany, Suny Press, NY: 1999), chap. …

This paper explores the development of the Deutsche Lufthansa South American Airmail Service during 1933-1939. Using original source documents from the Lufthansa archives and postal history artifacts in the author's possession, we examine route development, competition and cooperation with the French service, methods of multimodal transportation, equipment evolution and the overall pursuit of postal expedience. Particular emphasis is placed upon the contract negotiations among German and British authorities; Colonial authorities in Bathurst, Gambia; and the German and UK post offices.

My previous article in Kelleher's Collectors Connection introduced the concept of the Taxonomy of Cover Elements. In this third article, I discuss Postal History Research Sources & Methods. Traditional sources include specialized philatelic libraries and digitized journals, as well as Postal Bulletins, Laws and Regulations. This article also explores the use of governmental websites, genealogical sources, retroReveal.org, tools and techniques for conducting analytical philately, and non-philatelic archives. The article also proposes a curriculum for teaching courses in postal history to undergraduate history and economics majors, as well as a comparable curriculum at the high school AP level.

This document is my third column, as published in the July-August, 2016 issue of Kelleher's Collectors Connection and contains extracts from my forthcoming book, "Mastering Postal History".

PESTILENZE, PROFUMI, PURGHE E POSTE

PESTILENCES, PERFUMES, PURGES AND POSTS
Un compendio sulla storia della disinfezione delle corrispondenze durante pestilenze e pandemie
(pubblicato da ARTE DEL FRANCOBOLLO, Aprile 2020)

A compendium on the history of the disinfection of correspondences during plagues and pandemics
(published by ARTE DEL Francobollo, April 2020)

An estimate is made of the capacity of the hinterland of Seleucia on the Tigris and Babylon to feed their inhabitants. The estimate is made on the basis of archaeological surveys, data concerning the Babylonian yields, the size of the cities and irrigated area, data concerning famines. The conclusion is that Seleucia and Babylon could be fed by their own hinterlands even if we accept the highest figures for the population of Seleucia (600,000).