Postcrossing Blog

Our friend Iris (aka scrutiny) from Hong Kong has an amazing radar for postal-themed links and projects. A while ago, she showed us these local stamps and they are so cool that we wanted to share them with you too!

The stamps themselves feature historical buildings from Hong Kong, which are being revitalised as part of an ongoing campaign to “enhance public understanding and appreciation of the built heritage in Hong Kong”. But what makes them special is that when hovered with a smartphone using the HKPostStamps app, the stamps gain a whole other dimension!

Iris filmed this video to show everyone:

While not being the first use of augmented reality in philately, it’s certainly a very interesting one. Each building’s rendering includes interactive hotspots, which bring up more information when you touch them on the smartphone screen such as opening hours, website links, and photos. I think that’s pretty neat — how often do you get to hold an historical building in your hands? 😊

Thank you Iris, for taking the time to show us! And if anyone knows of other interesting philatelic issues, share them in the comments — we’re always curious about stamp innovations.

Dia dhuit — or hello from Ireland! 🇮🇪

We have good news coming from the North Atlantic today: An Post is getting ready to release a lovely new Postcrossing stamp tomorrow, on October 5th! Irish artist Cathy Dineen did the illustration for Design HQ, who created the stamp. It features postcards being passed from person to person. Have a look: Isn’t it just gorgeous? 😍 Cathy did a wonderful job of capturing the connections that the project sparks as well as its diversity on this small format. And the launch is just days before World Post Day takes place, which is a nice bonus too.

The stamps will be available throughout the country and on An Post’s online shop… but if you’re in Ireland or can make it to Dublin in the weekend, there will be a large meetup on October 7th! Attendees will be able to visit the General Post Office’s museum and check out the Witnessing History exhibition too. More details can be found on this forum thread.

Hurray for beautiful stamps that honour Postcrossing and its community!

Today is the day the trio of new Swiss Postcrossing-themed stamps is finally being launched! Hurray!

As part of the stamp launch, Swiss Post is organising a giveaway to promote their use. Every Postcrossing postcard sent from Switzerland between today and October 31st and which is registered before the end of December this year, will be entered on a lucky draw. Ten winners will be picked by Paulo’s random number generator, and each will receive a 100CHF voucher to buy postage on Swiss Post’s shop, plus the new Postcrossing stamps! Pretty generous, right? The formal rules can be found on this page.

So, if you’re in Switzerland, get some Postcrossing stamps and start requesting addresses to send postcards to! I’m sure everyone will be extra happy to receive your postcards… and you might end up with free postage for many more cards!

And if you’ll be in Switzerland later this month, a meetup + guided tour of a mail distribution centre is being planned for September 30th in Schlieren, to celebrate the new stamps. Check out the forum thread for more details!

Sabine (aka turtles) from Germany shared this photo of the new stamps she also pre-ordered!

Grüetzi!

Today we’re happy to share some good news from the land of cheese and chocolate! 🇨🇭  Swiss Post is going to launch 3 new Postcrossing-themed stamps later this year! Have a look:

Can you guess which stamp should be used on a postcard sent to Switzerland, Europe or the rest of the world?

The trio of fun stamps was drawn by cartoonist Max Spring, whose style will be familiar to many as his illustrations often appear in newspapers, stamps and other publications. He did a wonderful job on these, and we’re sure they’ll be a highlight on any postcard traveling from Switzerland!

Though the stamps will only be launched on September 7th, they’re already available online for pre-order on Swiss Post’s shop. While you wait for September to use them, keep an eye on the forum and meetup page, as a meeting is in the works to celebrate the stamp launch! 😊

Many of you might not remember we used to have polls on the site, a looooong time ago. The last time we ran a poll on Postcrossing was back in 2011… and we seem to have forgotten all about them. Paulo stumbled on the code for polls recently and was pleasantly surprised to discover that it still works! So we decided to run a poll about something that has been intriguing us for a while: people’s preferences on the stamp types and how they adhere to postcards. Are self-adhesive stamps (that you peel off a sheet) better than stamps on gummed paper (that you lick)? Does it even matter?

But first, a bit of postal history: can you name the first stamp ever made? And who was its creator?

If your answer was Penny Black and Sir Rowland Hill, you’d be correct on all counts! In its 1837 pamphlet, Sir Rowland Hill called for “low and uniform rates” according to weight (rather than distance) and proposed the concept of stamps: a piece of paper “covered at the back with a glutinous wash”. The first gums were called cement and consisted of a mixture of potato starch, wheat starch and acacia gum. The idea “stuck”, and quickly spread from the UK to the rest of the world.

In 1964, 124 years after the release of the Penny Black, the first self-adhesive stamp was created by an unlikely country… Sierra Leone! That’s right — this African nation was the first one to give it a try, followed by a Christmas stamp from the USA ten years later… and many other countries after that.

If you’re curious to learn more about these themes, check out the Wikipedia page for Postage Stamp gum.

So back to our poll — 8495 postcrossers responded to it over the past week, and these were the results:

Looks like things are more or less evenly divided! Though a large number of postcrossers doesn’t seem to have a preference, from those that do prefer a type of stamps, the choice of the majority seems to be self-adhesive stamps. That surprised me, as I expected postal lovers to prefer the traditional ones… but I can definitely understand that licking might not be for everyone and adhesive stamps can be more practical.

What about you? Which camp are you on, and why?

And last but not least, running a poll was fun! If you have ideas of other interesting polls that we could make, please share them in the comments. We’ll try not to let another 6 years go by until we run the next poll! 😅