Animals

It’s difficult to imagine the wonderful children’s story The Gruffalo was created 20 years ago. To celebrate, Royal Mail have issued six special stamps with colourful illustrations of The Gruffalo characters in a chronological story across two horizontal se-tenant strips…

Modelled on America’s “Liberty Bell”, the 10-ton “Bell of Freedom and Peace” featured on those stamps arrived at Schöneberg Town Hall (then in the Western Sector of Berlin) on October 21, 1950, having travelled from the United States via Bremerhaven and the…

1981 was proclaimed by the General Assembly of the United Nations to be the International Year of Disabled Persons. Although many countries issued stamps featuring various disabilities that year, they were by no means the first stamps issued regarding the…

The Phare de Ténès (1997 Algerian stamp above left) is the oldest lighthouse in Algeria. Built in 1861 on a rocky Mediterranean coastal site, the lighthouse rises to 57 meters above the sea. This lighthouse has withstood the two earthquakes that…

The subject for 2019’s Europa stamps is National Birds. Spain has a bearded vulture on its 2019 six-stamp Premium Sheet. The bird is adapted to live in the harsh high landscape of the Pyrenean mountain range from Navarre to Catalonia.…

Each summer a small island in the Irish Sea becomes the focus of motorcycling enthusiasts from around the world. The Isle of Man is a self-governing British Crown Dependency between Great Britain and Ireland. The island is about 32 miles…

An extremely popular event is held each year in the period between Christmas Day and New Year’s Day in The Netherlands. A radio station, NPO Radio 2, hosts a week-long programme playing what listeners vote to be the best 2,000…

There’s no doubt of the attraction of young animals and the ability of many a young mammal to draw an ‘Ooo’ or ‘Aaah’ from the human being. It can also be the subject of interest to the stamp collector as…

This stamp is part of a  sheet issued by Australia in 2005 was spookily entitled “Creatures of the Slime” and focussed on the world’s first animals – multicellular organisms, some probably related to worms, jellyfish, and snails, dating back some…

For thematic stamp collectors the horse has always been a very popular subject. If you are interested in horse sports or a particular breed there is bound to be a stamp to satisfy your interest. The stamps shown below were…

Below you can see just a small selection of stamps recently added to PostBeeld’s enormous stock of stamps. Please visit the website if you wish to view more. If you are a particular collector of Germany, Thurn and Taxis stamps…

The beautiful pictographic map by the artist William Henry Jackson seen in this article shows the first United States of America Pony Express mail delivery route, a distance of 1,800 miles, from St. Joseph, Missouri to Sacramento, California. It has…

The man depicted on the stamp to the left, from the U.S.A., issued in 1985, is J.J. Audubon. You would never imagine the rather bland image of the man on the stamp could be linked to the wonderfully coloured works…

Naturally, the ease with which one can communicate with people worldwide via email and other modern instant messaging systems has its advantages, but these methods have caused a great decline in the act of physically writing a letter and sending…

Among the hundreds of stamps added daily to PostBeeld’s stock are those shown below in this article.

As a young boy collecting stamps I was often more attracted to those with colour and shape rather than rarity. Diamond-shaped stamps from Hungary, Monaco and the Burundi particularly caught my eye. The stamp on the left is from Hungary…