Local Stamps
Local stamps have a long history and began to be issued soon after the invention of the postage stamp. Zemstvo stamps were issued in rural areas of the Russian Empire (c.1860-1917), and local stamps have been issued in many other countries. Many local stamps performed a genuine postal function where the national post was lacking. Other locals, however, amount to nothing more than colourful labels.
In the United Kingdom many local carriage labels have been issued by offshore islands, which in some cases had a genuine use to pay for transport of the mail to the mainland by ferry. Others were produced simply to sell to collectors and tourists. Usually they had to be placed on the back of the envelope, with a conventional stamp on the front to pay for onward delivery by the official postal service. Islands for which such labels have been issued include the Summer Isles, Lundy and the Calf of Man.
Hotel Stamps may also be regarded as a form of local stamp.
Read more about this topic: Cinderella Stamp
Famous quotes containing the words local and/or stamps:
“These native villages are as unchanging as the woman in one of their stories. When she was called before a local justice he asked her age. “I have 45 years.” “But,” said the justice, “you were forty-five when you appeared before me two years ago.” “Señor Judge,” she replied proudly, drawing herself to her full height, “I am not of those who are one thing today and another tomorrow!””
—State of New Mexico, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“Even in harmonious families there is this double life: the group life, which is the one we can observe in our neighbour’s household, and, underneath, another—secret and passionate and intense—which is the real life that stamps the faces and gives character to the voices of our friends. Always in his mind each member of these social units is escaping, running away, trying to break the net which circumstances and his own affections have woven about him.”
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)