Piltz Howard - Aircraft and Aviation Stamps

TRANSPORT

PHILATELY

SERIES

To my four grandchildren who bring me such immense joy: Hollie May, William Dennis, Isabella Amelie and Emily Mabel .

TRANSPORT

PHILATELY

SERIES

HOWARD PILTZ

First published in Great Britain in 2020 by

Pen and Sword Transport

An imprint of

Pen & Sword Books Ltd

Yorkshire - Philadelphia

Copyright Howard Piltz, 2020

ISBN 978 1 47387 186 1

eISBN 978 1 47387 188 5

Mobi ISBN 978 1 4738 7187 8

The right of Howard Piltz to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the Publisher in writing.

Pen & Sword Books Ltd incorporates the Imprints of Pen & Sword Books Archaeology, Atlas, Aviation, Battleground, Discovery, Family History, History, Maritime, Military, Naval, Politics, Railways, Select, Transport, True Crime, Fiction, Frontline Books, Leo Cooper, Praetorian Press, Seaforth Publishing, Wharncliffe and White Owl.

For a complete list of Pen & Sword titles please contact

PEN & SWORD BOOKS LIMITED

47 Church Street, Barnsley, South Yorkshire, S70 2AS, England

E-mail:

Website: www.pen-and-sword.co.uk

or

PEN AND SWORD BOOKS

1950 Lawrence Rd, Havertown, PA 19083, USA

E-mail:

Website: www.penandswordbooks.com

Early in 2018, I was wandering through my favourite internet sites looking for further stamps to add to my collection and just as I was preparing the manuscript for this book, I came across stamps from a country Id never heard of - Niuafoou where?

One of the wonders of the late twentieth century and through to today is the ability to use the Internet to research your subject, to try to find out where on earth that strangely named place really IS; as it happens it is the northern-most island of the Tonga archipelago in the southern Pacific Ocean. Read what I found out in the chapter on the Pacific Region.

Collecting stamps brings a wonderful new view of the world to the collector, celebrated in the more formal title of the philatelist, who is led through an amazing world of knowledge, where the inquisitive mind can ponder the mysteries of bygone times. Why, you may ask, do British postage stamps never, but never boast their country of origin? And of course, weve already stumbled upon Niuafoou.

Likewise, someone with a worldly interest in transport may find that the hobby will lead him or her all over the world, if not literally then as a by-product of studying the subject. There are a great many transport professionals who have worked on several different continents throughout their working lives to bring the benefit of their skills to areas one might consider under-developed in the areas of public transport. Personally, I have spent many years as an enthusiast of most forms of public transport and have been to places that until the advent of cheap air travel seemed quite outlandish. I have been to a lake on Vancouver Island on Canadas Pacific coast where lived the worlds two largest flying boats regaling in the name of Mars, whilst it seemed to me at the time I was 14 quite exciting, but utterly easy in 1959, to talk myself onto the inaugural KLM Viscount flight from Manchester to Amsterdam only to find there was no return flight home that day, memories of the heart-clutching scream from Dad over the phone will never fade: Youre WHERE ?. Then there was another flight, not much later but this time with permission and paid for to go plane-spotting alone to the Paris Air Show. Not many years later, I visited the USA to look for the last gasps of two iconic forms of American transport PCC trams in Newark, NJ, and the Pennsylvania Railroad GG1 electric locomotives. I could also go on a little too long about getting rather merry drinking the local brews in places like Prague, Lisbon or the countryside around Brussels whilst chasing trams.

At first sight it might seem a little odd that one should wish to combine these two totally disparate hobbies, but by good fortune I happen to have a liking for both subjects and a long time ago began to appreciate that in stamps one could find the wonderful combination of transport history told within a glorious gallery of miniature works of art. Watch through the ages as the reproduction techniques on stamps have developed from simple monochrome etchings with carefully sculpted framework such as this 1924 stamp from Bolivia.

To the untutored eye the detail is not readily apparent and some time must be spent on the countrys language and its currency to fully appreciate this little gem. Interestingly, apart from a very few definitives of the 1890s and 1900s it was to be 1963 before a British stamp would appear with more than one colour; not even the UKs 1953 Coronation stamps boasted more. The accepted appearance developed first to two or three colours and then, as with everything else towards the end of the twentieth century, convention went out of the window as we saw full colour art-work and the use of photographs and quite often in these days of digital photography fairly heavily manipulated ones at that.

There will be several different formats that the reader will find mentioned in this book, and there follows a brief summary for the novice philatelist:

Mint stamps: unused stamps, un-marked on their face and with the gum on the back still intact. It used to be the habit of collectors to stick gummed, paper hinges to the back of their stamps for mounting in an album. The damage that this does for serious collectors has discredited this practice and one will often find these days the initials MNH (Mint, not hinged) within the description of a particular stamp or set of stamps.

Used stamps: As the terminology states, postage stamps that have been used for the purpose for which they were designed, indicating that the due fee for the service required has been paid, and stuck on the envelope or parcel as proof. Hence they bear a post-mark (sometimes referred to as a franking or cancellation) to indicate the office of cancellation and will undoubtedly have no gum on the back but traces of the paper they had been stuck to. Apart from its rarity value, a collector will look for how heavy the post-mark appears on the stamp and how well the backing has been removed, a thinning of the stamp itself or loss of any part of the face or the perforations will render the stamp valueless, scrap, or where it is a particularly rare example seriously devalued.