Laos stamps managed to hold up well through more than twenty years of war.  But by the end of 1975, when the Pathet Lao had finally overthrown the monarchy of King  Savang Vatthana, the philatelic glory days were over.

These are the last stamps issued by the Kingdom of Laos, an imperf set from the UNESCO issue of August, 1975.

The stamps of Laos released in the 1950s through the mid 1970s were among the world’s best for that era.  Produced in Paris, many were engraved by masters of the day such as Roger Fennetaux, Andre Freres, and Jean Pheulpin.

Are you interested in the stamps of Laos?  I try to keep a good stock… see what’s available in my online store.

Romania issued this stamp on April 26, 1946 to honor one of its most beloved citizens, Georges Enescu.

Georges Enescu was not just Romania’s most accomplished violinist.  He was a symbol of the nation’s pride, perhaps the best known Romanian of his era.

He was a prodigy, studied in Vienna, and made his U.S. debut in 1923 conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra at New York City’s Carnegie Hall.  The village where he was born was renamed in his honor, and in Bucharest, the mansion where he lived in the late 1930s and early 1940s, is now the Georges Enescu Museum.

When this stamp was released, Enescu was living in Paris.  The Soviets, who had occupied Romania by force since the autumn of 1944, understood his propaganda value.

We don’t know if the stamp was issued as a means to appeal to Enescu’s national pride and cajole his return to Romania, given his distaste for the Soviet occupiers, or if it was to suggest to skeptical Romanian citizens that Enescu was aligned with the new military regime.

In any event, Enescu did not return to Romania, and stayed in Paris until his death in 1955.  He is buried in the city’s celebrated Pere Lachaise cemetery with other musicians ranging from Frederic Chopin to Jim Morrison.

Take a close look at this Romania stamp honoring Georges Enescu and you will notice at least two strange aspects.

First, the name Enescu does not appear on this stamp.  The design does not reveal that Enescu is a musician.  No violin, no sheet music.

Second, this stamp was printed tete-beche.  Notice how alternating stamps are inverted.

I try to keep a supply of this fascinating stamp in my online stamp store.  Take a look if you would like to add this interesting piece to your collection.

Stamps from French Polynesia have enchanted stamp collectors for years.  This one from 1985 does as good a job as any at capturing why these stamps are so appealing to collectors… the wonderful topics French Polynesia’s stamps portray.

Take a look at this stamp.  Topical stamp collectors who have a place in their collection for a roasted pig can’t do much better than this.

French Polynesia releases all sorts of interesting stamps for topical collectors… from surfboards to ships, flip flops to flowers, art to architecture, there is a fascinating variety.

French Polynesia first issued stamps in 1892.  They were part of the French Navigation and Commerce or Sage issue.  In those days, the official name of the South Pacific islands was Etablissements de L’Oceanie.  This changed to Polynesie Francaise in 1955.

French Polynesia has been one of the French Colonies to release stamps that were part of the great omnibus issues…

• 1931 Colonial Exposition

• 1937 Paris International Exposition

• 1937 Colonial Arts Exhibition

• 1939 New York World’s Fair

French Polynesia airmail stamps first appeared in 1935.  More than 200 were released until the last airmail stamps were issued in 1987.

One set of airmail stamps was never sold in the post office of Papeete or anywhere else in French Polynesia.  It was produced by the Vichy government in France in 1944, and showed a beach scene.

I try to keep a good stock of French Polynesia in my online stamp store. So please visit my store to see if there is something for your collection.  It’s one of my favorite countries.

Czeslaw Slania is widely acclaimed as the greatest engraver of postage stamps of  our generation.

When he died in 2005 at the age of 84, the prolific native of Poland who took up residence in Sweden in 1956 had engraved more than a thousand stamps.

As a young man, Slania employed his considerable skills forging documents for the Polish Resistance during World War II.

In his final years, acclaimed as Sweden’s Royal Court engraver and a Commander of the Order of Poland, he remained active and engaged in his work.  His final engraved stamp was released in the year of his death by the United Nations.

But the spectacular work of Czeslaw Slania was not without its occasional imperfection.

During the 1980s, Monaco issued a series of stamps depicting Prince Rainier, engravings by Slania, who was a personal favorite engraver of the stamp collecting Prince.

One of the engravings had to be touched up.  Take a look at the stamps below, pay close attention to the medals on the Prince’s uniform, and you will notice that in the top stamp, the vertical lines of the lower medal have been considerably strengthened.

Over the course of his career, Czeslaw Slania engraved stamps for countries such as Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Denmark, England, Estonia, Faroes, France, Germany, Greenland, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Jamaica, Kazakhistan, Latvia, Lithuania, Monaco, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, San Marino, Sweden, the United Nations and the United States.

On a January day in 1929, and we’re not 100% certain exactly which day it was, Canada released  this 50 cent stamp depicting the schooner Bluenose.

When the stamp was placed on sale, either on January 6 or January 8th, it was immediately acknowledged as extraordinary.

It is not hard to find a stamp collector who considers this the most beautiful stamp any nation has ever produced.

A story surrounds this stunning stamp that may or may not be true… I have not been able to verify it.

Look closely at the schooner to the left.  It may not be a different vessel.  It may actually be Bluenose.  The design of the stamp could be a composite of two images taken by the Nova Scotian photographer W.R. MacAskill.

Another noteworthy piece of information…  The first plate produced for printing  Bluenose was flawed.  Just 200 copies of the stamp were printed from this plate.  The stamps were apparently destroyed, as was the plate.

Plates two and three produced 1.04 million copies of the stamp.  Engraving was done by the American Bank Note Company in New York and printing by the Canadian Bank Note Company in Ottawa.

Imperfs also of this King George V scroll issue classic also exist.

The working Grand Banks schooner itself remains a revered icon of Canada.  No American schooner could beat it other than Gertrude Thibault, which captured the Sir Thomas Lipton International Fishing Challenge Cup in 1930.

After that, Bluenose never lost a race.  Under 10,000 square feet of sail she hit speeds of 17 knots.

When she was at work fishing, she set records.  Twice she brought in the season’s largest catch to her home port of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia.  Often derided by competitors as a vessel built purely for racing, she more than earned her stripes as a working schooner.

Launched in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia in 1921, Bluenose foundered on a reef off Haiti and was lost in January, 1946.

Here is one of many reminders that fascinating postal history for stamp collectors continues to be created every day.

In 1961 Colombia released a set of stamps to honor a nurse who died in the autumn floods of 1955.

These were not semi-postals, but postal tax stamps.  And in this case, the tax was mandatory.

All mail in Colombia was supposed to include these stamps during the month of November, 1961.  They depicted a Red Cross nurse, Manuelita de la Cruz, who lost her life while helping flood victims.

Colombia issued its first Red Cross postal tax stamp in 1935. The practice came to an end in 1965.

Nepal has been issuing stamps since 1881, although its stamps were only valid for postage within Nepal and neighboring India until 1959.  Three years before this, Nepal released a set of stamps to commemorate the coronation of its King and Queen.

The set is curious because King Mahendra had a new bride for the coronation.  Queen Ratna was actually the sister of the king’s first wife, who died two years previously.

Four years later, after the King of Nepal visited Elvis Presely in 1960, King Mahendra suspended the Nepal constitution and dissolved the nation’s parliament.

Here are Nepal’s King and Queen on the set with Elvis in Los Angeles.  Their Southern California trip also featured visits  to Disneyland and a refinery in El Segundo.

Nepal has always been a bit of a challenging country for stamp collectors.  Although often considered aligned with India, it is not strictly considered a British Commonwealth country.  When Nepal launched its telegraph service in 1917, postage stamps were used to pay the fees, and, as a result, the cancellations which indicate postal use can be confusing.

In January, 1972, King Mahendra died a strange death.  Only 52 years old, he was big game hunting in southern Nepal with hotelier and CIA operative John Coapman.  Nine years previously, the King had granted permission to Coapman to operate a game hunting lodge in Nepal’s Royal Chitwan National Park.  For intelligence gathering purposes, the location provided an ideal vantage point on both China and India.

While hunting, the King died in Coapman’s arms.

The stamp that commemorates his life and notes his death was not released until December.  At the time of this posting, Queen Ratna is still alive.

I try to keep a stock of Nepal stamps in my store… because of the growing demand for the stamps of this unusual country, many of the singles and sets can be hard be hard to find.

Mayotte is one of those countries that doesn’t quite fit in… it is not exactly a French Colony and not exactly part of the Comoro Islands.

But as far as stamp collectors are concerned, Mayotte is fascinating.

Geographically, Mayotte is indeed one of the Comoro Islands, located in the Indian Ocean off the east coast of Africa near Madagascar.

The first Mayotte stamps were members of the classic French Colonial Navigation and Commerce series, released in 1892.  These stamps were surcharged with new values in 1912, and this set was used not only in Mayotte but in the Comoro Islands and in nearby Madagascar.

Then the drought of Mayotte stamps began, a philatelic drought that dragged on for 85 years.  In 1997, France Marianne issues were overprinted, and original Mayotte stamps were put on sale.

Why did Mayotte go for 85 years without its own stamps?  Mayotte’s political status is murky.  It is technically an overseas department of France, but is aligned, in a bit of an unclear fashion, with the Comoro islands.  After the 1912 surcharges Mayotte used Madagascar issues.  The first Comoro stamps appeared in

Mayotte is an Islamic country.  Its people speak a Swahili dialect and French.  The island produces coffee, vanilla and shrimp, and is plagued with high unemployment rates.

But its contemporary stamps are well designed and issued in relatively small quantities.  I try to keep Mayotte stamps in stock, so please visit my store to see what is available… or browse to see what has been newly listed that may be of interest.

Stamp collectors who specialize in the stamps of France sooner or later become familiar with the name Andre Spitz.  Spitz was one of the most prolific designers of twentieth century France stamps.

In 1938 his first design was accepted to appear on a postage stamp.  It depicted a woman holding a flute of champagne.  The stamp was released to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the birth of Dom Perignon, the widely acknowledged inventor of champagne.

For the next 50 years the work of Andre Spitz illustrated a number of topics on French stamps, ranging from portraits of World War Two French resistance heroes to cathedrals and chateaux.

This Maximum Card from 1959 shows the Andre Spitz design used for a stamp to commemorate the Polio vaccination.

Over the course of his career, Andre Spitz also designed stamps for a number of French colonies and possessions, such as Senegal, Tchad, Mali and the Congo.  His work has also appeared on a Monaco stamp.

Along with his work on French postage stamps, Spitz taught at the Lycee Henri IV in Paris.  He designed his last stamp at the age of 85, and passed away in 1977 at the age of 94.

If you are interested in collecting France stamps, I invite you to visit my online stamp store to see my stock.