Thank you so much @shugal for your extensive knowledge on German cancellations! Since you’re such an expert, I have a question for you: I live in Berlin Lichtenberg (beautiful place…) and I always want my recipients to know that my cards come from this particular district. That’s why I always go to the post office and ask the super kind lady there to manually stamp my mail: she always does it in front of me and it’s super satisfying…
My question is: these cards are still fed into a sorting machine – they have to, right? So how does the machine know that the stamps have already been cancelled? Aren’t they going to add a second postmark on the already postmarked stamps?
Omg, really? That’s kind of sad! Only recently I found out that Großbriefe are sprayed on instead of being cancelled in the traditional way. I sent an envelope to a friend of mine in Italy, and he showed me the postmark, which was kind of unexpected!
To be honest, it’s just a mess of lines and the writing is also extremely illegible. If the whole of Germany switched to a system like this (and not to the one used in France or Canada which, at least, yields more legible results), I’m gonna be very sad…
Omg that would actually be my dream! Although I’d be so scared to mess up and create a disaster of a stamp By the way, what is it with Nordic countries and postmarks? They all seem to skip this part of the letter processing process – even Norway, as I’ve already said… I don’t know about the situation in Sweden though, so I might be generalising based on what I’ve received / heard so far…
You should actually show me some pictures of the 南门营投 stamp on non-Chinese postcards as well! It’d be super interesting actually, I really like these arrival stamps. It’s a shame that we don’t have them anymore, coz you can’t see when the card was delivered anymore…
It’s crazy how there are so many variations… One would think that, in China, this whole thing would be neatly standardised… But, to be honest, even international airport stamps (the ones they put in your passport) have slight differences – this is a little bit OT, but I have to tell you that I’ve seen at least one passport stamp that doesn’t really conform to the pattern.
Oh wow, that’s neat! I need to start collecting these stamps that include the languages of ethnic minorities… It’s actually a very inclusive thing that China is doing, and seeing the Arabic script (for Uyghur) might be a little treat for my eyes
That’s my favourite part about living here in Germany! As I’ve already told Shugal, I just need to ask the postal clerk, and they’ll comply with my request I saw a similar handstamp in my hometown in Italy but, as soon as I tried to ask if my mail could be stamped with it, I got scolded. Italian postal workers… always super rude!!
It would be interesting to know more about these machines though… Are they similar to the ones we have in Europe? Or are there big differences? Are these only used for postmarking, or do they also sort the mail based on the addresses? So many questions, but it isn’t easy to find answers online…
(But the good thing is that we’re on a forum full of experts, so we can just ask whenever we have a doubt… And being a curious postmark-lover, I tend to have lots of questions to ask haha!)
Hi! These, on the other hand, are actual commemorative stamps! Since they’re a completely different beast, I think they should be more carefully analysed in a separate thread (that you could start yourself!). Otherwise, what might happen is that we’ll end up only talking about commemorative stamps, and there will be no space left for normal postmark discussions… And, for the sake of neatness and clarity, it’s best to keep the two things separate!
By the way, since DMSOGeek already told you about the Japanese postmark, I’ll just let you know that the Taiwanese one comes from a temporary post office (临时邮局, línshí yóujú) from the city of Hsinchu (新竹, xīnzhú), which is in the northern part of Taiwan. The stamp commemorates classical poetry (古典诗词, gǔdiǎn shīcí). The vertical text close to the middle (发行首日, fāxíng shǒurì) means – I think – “first day of issue”.
(Sorry for using simplified characters! Those are the ones I can use right now – it’d be more complicated for me to switch to traditional… I hope you can kinda see the resemblances between the ones I typed out and the ones on the postmark!)
Wow those stamps are super cute! Also I love how the Dutch postmark is clearly a spray-on one, yet it tries to emulate the look of traditional cancellations… Good job! By the way, many of the cards I receive from the Netherlands have a Nexive tracking sticker on them. I don’t remove them because I never touch or modify the stuff I receive in any way; however, sometimes they cover the stamps (actually they always do), which isn’t the best thing ever…