July 19, 2015

Holly Moors’ stamp art booklets

Filed under: Art by Branko Collin @ 2:32 pm

holly-moors-stamps

We’ve mentioned Holly Moors before as a blogger from the North, but he is also an artist.

Recently Moors has been scanning a couple of his experiments from the 1980s in which he filled old Davo booklets (aimed at postage stamp collectors) with rubber stamp prints. For the first booklet he used pre-existing stamps, for the second he carved a rubber stamp from a HEMA eraser.

This is art that doesn’t easily fit on a wall in a museum, so a gallery on a weblog is a good place to study it. After you’ve clicked a link, clicking one of the thumbnail images will open the gallery. Moors chose Davo booklets, because he felt they “invited repetitive stamping”.

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September 14, 2012

Cute blonde princesses on children’s charity stamps

Filed under: General,Photography by Orangemaster @ 9:49 am

A new series of charity stamps (‘kinderpostzegels’), which are sold door to door by school children raising money for poor kids in poor countries , will feature the ‘Triple AAA’, aka Princesses Amalia, Alexia and Ariane, the daughters of Prince Willem Alexander and Princess Máxima. The Triple AAA joke was said by the Prince himself once, we can’t take credit for that.

Starting 26 September, one of the 200,000 school children who sell these stamps will ring my neighbour’s door bell and sell him pics of the young blonde Dutch royals. In November, the stamps will be available for purchase at the post office.

(Link and photo: binnenland.nieuws.nl)

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November 14, 2010

TNT postage stamps no longer display euro value

Filed under: Design,General by Branko Collin @ 1:34 am

So let me explain this snail mail thing to you. It is orders of magnitude slower than e-mail, and yet you have to pay for the privilege to use it. The way you prove you have paid is by attaching real-life stickers called stamps to your mail.

You can understand that with all these drawbacks I don’t use snail mail very often, and that it therefore took me a while to realise ‘they’ have changed the way stamps work. In June of this year TNT Post switched from euro denominated stamps to non-denominated stamps, following in the footsteps of many other European countries (see illustration).

TNT Post is the postal part of the former national PTT. Until last year it had a monopoly in the Netherlands on light mail. The rise of both e-mail and competitors has led to plans within the company to fire 11,000 postal workers, who in return have announced they will strike on November 16.

(Image: crop of a scan of non-denominated TNT postage stamps)

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March 14, 2010

Book-shaped stamp (also: stamp-shaped book)

Filed under: Art,Literature by Branko Collin @ 10:31 am

TNT Post has issued an 8-page stamp in honour of the Dutch book week, which runs from March 10-20.

The stamp is valued at 2.20 euro, which according to TNT’s press release should be enough to send somebody a book.

The book on the stamp was written by Joost Zwagerman (photo), and can also be downloaded here. The book stamp was designed by Richard Hutten. It measures 3 × 4 centimetres, and 266,000 copies were made.

(Source photo: TNTpost.nl. Photographer: Roy Beusker. Link: Bright.nl.)

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