Saturday 31 August 2013

Official Philatelic Passports - Stamp Show 2000

I recently read Tim Clegg's interesting article in September issue of Stamp & Coin Mart (p.44-45) about his "stamps" collected en route on his charity fund-raising walk to Santiago de Compostela in Spain - the Camino. I've become quite interested in postmarks and commemmorative hand stamps and have incorporated some in my Postage stamp quilt designs, detailed in previous posts.  They all have a certain story to tell and are part of the history of the place they were sent from.
Rummaging through a drawer, as I quite often do, in the search for  stamps to include in a current stamp collage picture, I came across a souvenir Passport from The Stamp Show 2000 at Earls Court in May of that year, issued by Royal Mail.  It's the Official Philatelic Passport, and contains more than 60 pages with the stand number and country exhibiting together with the stamps and postmarks collected at the show.
As a stamp collector and  part-time stamp dealer my dad would make a yearly visit to the Stamp Exhibition and on this occasion he visited the majority of stands and at each one collected a postage stamp and then had it postmarked with a unique hand stamp. Sadly this was the last  one he attended, and I haven't come across any more of these passports, but feel sure there must have been others. It's a lovely item and something to treasure as it is a record of a day in the life of  a keen philatelist.

Stamps from the stands of Malta, Moldova, Monaco and the Netherlands
Stamps from Kiribati, Mauritius, Na mibia and Nauru.
Note the use of the Millennium Dome  image 

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