NEW WAR-TIME CRAZE

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 4, Issue 129, 14 July 1941, Page 5

NEW WAR-TIME CRAZE

COLLECTING OF POSTMARKS VAST INTERNATIONAL CLUB In War-scarred London sits a man whose preoccupation is not with falling bombs:, but battered envelopes. Ha is thet originator of a new war-time vogue which is growing in popularity from month io month from one side of the Atlantic to tho other. When you get an out-of-the-way envelope you probably glance at j' twice and throw it away. In doing so you throw away a curious object which has a market value and is today being sought after by collectors in Britain and overseas, particularly in the United States. Tin's vast international club of postmark collectors is; run from Lon-. don anrl no country in the world haa taken to this offspring of philately more ardently than America. It is claimed that postmark collecting isi more amusing,, instructive and fascinating than ordinary stamp collecting. \ Many of the postmarks are indeed curious. For example, letters transmitted from enemy territory via the Red Cross, Geneva, or through Cook's Agency, Lisbon, show from stampings that they have been opened by both German and British censors. They will become rarities. Again, in war, letters are sometimes transferred at sea. When they are, they arei so surcharged and become, for the collector of postmarks, prized acquisitions. , Old envelopes from prisoners of war, from pioneer flight mail bags, from concentration camps, nil have collector value. In London the first "Postmark Catalogue" is now being nropared amid the bombs.