Culture

Collecting street art stamps is not only a fascinating hobby for philatelists, but also for art lovers. They offer a unique insight into the culture and social issues of the time in which they were made. Street art, once considered…

PostBeeld owner Rob Smit and all of his co-workers send season’s greetings to our clients worldwide and wish everyone a happy and healthy 2025. Today we present a sample of stamps issued to celebrate Christmas. “A Fairytale Christmas” is the…

This 2024 stamp issue – the subject being the Sri Lankan Kandy Esala Perahera festival – is the widest stamp ever produced according to its issuer, the Sri Lankan Postal service. The stamp measures 205mm x 30mm. The Esala Perahera…

We have recently acquired a great collection of African stamps. Here is a small selection. In 1999 Senegal issued a great variety of stamp sheets covering many subjects. That above features space exploration rockets. The top row (left to right)…

World-renowned scientists feature on the stamp sheets and definitives produced by Paraguay in 1965. The imperforated stamps above include portraits of Einstein and Galileo. Born in March 1879 in Ulm, Germany, Albert Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics…

Spain’s postal service Correos paid tribute to philatelic collectors in 2020 by issuing this stamp showing the famous painting The Philatelist, a beautiful work from 1929 by Swiss painter François Barraud (1899-1934). In addition, it is printed with a magnifying glass…

Many of us Europeans are aware of great artists from France, Spain, Italy, Holland, Great Britain etc. and we don’t tend to know much about art from the eastern reaches of the continent. Consequently, here are some definitives from Poland,…

Here we have a very small selection of stamp sheets from Great Britain recently added to PostBeeld’s vast stock. Please visit PostBeeld’s website for a more comprehensive view of many more. In 2012 Great Britain hosted the Olympic Games, previously…

There were so many great stamps issued by France last year I find it difficult to make a small selection for this article! Above and below: could these be the first postage stamps depicting electric bicycles? Please enlighten me if…

This year, 2024, is the Year of the Wood Dragon and the Chinese New Year, which begins on February 10th, will be celebrated in dozens of countries across the World. The dragon is considered to be one of the luckiest…

In 2023 Great Britain’s Royal Mail issued various philatelic items to commemorate the remarkable 70-year career of the Welsh-born singer Dame Shirley Bassey. Shown above is the cover of a Royal Mail Prestige Stamp Book, an informative 24-page publication written…

Staff at Freestampmagazine and PostBeeld wish our readers and buying customers a very happy time over the Christmas and New Year period. Christmas (from the Anglo-Saxon: Cristesmæsse, meaning “Christ’s Mass”) is the annual festival that commemorates the birth of Jesus…

The two Austrian stamps in this article feature the Universalmuseum Joanneum in Graz, Austria, considered the biggest of its kind in Central Europe, comprising nine buildings of historic interest available for its five million items in 20 collections. The Kunsthaus’s futuristic…

This article was originally published in December 2013: The United States Postal Service (USPS, which is heavily in debt) is destroying an entire run of stamps because the activities illustrated on three of the stamps in the fifteen stamp series…

Here we have a very small selection of stamps recently added to PostBeeld’s vast stock. Please visit PostBeeld’s website for a more comprehensive view of newly-added items. We begin with a few examples taken from a sizeable addition of stamps…

This stamp set was issued by the Dutch postal service postnl in 2023 and entitled ‘Typically Dutch’. The images seen on the sheet show: a vase with tulips, a carrier pigeon with a letter, a carrier bicycle with plants, a…