Semi-personal stamps, how official are they?
As mentioned before, you can now have your personal stamps made at most postal administrations. Most stamps are easy to distinguish from regular postage stamps. Often a word is printed on it that indicates this, or, as in the Netherlands, the personal stamps have their own framework. Here are a few Dutch personal stamp frames.
The use of personal stamps, also known as personalized stamps, can vary from country to country. You can usually create and use personalized stamps at your country's postal service, but there are certain guidelines and restrictions you must follow. For example, erotic images are not permitted, nor may they contain political statements.
In some countries the printing of personalized stamps is outsourced to licensed third parties. For example, in the USA you can order stamps from Zazzle and Premier Postage, and in Indonesia you can do so from Prisma. But in most cases the postal service keeps these practices under its own hands.
Below the Zazzle stamp, made for our ride over the Tail of the Dragon, Route 129, 11 miles and containing 318 (hairpin) curves. We as Dutchmen, together with 3 American friends.
In the Netherlands, the production of personal stamps is now reserved to PostNL. For a while it was possible to make sheets of personal stamps at the stamp shop in Bussum, but now this can only be done via the internet. Sometimes PostNL takes the printer to a trade fair, and then you can get your own image printed on a stamp there. A nice gesture for special occasions, of course, and we at the MFN bravely participate in this.
But now: some postal services nowadays use this possibility as a cash cow, by also issuing these type of "personalized" stamps themselves. For example, PostNL itself issues sheets with special trade fair stamps and nature scenes. Even for us MFN-ers they have made a personal stamp sheet with Solexes and one with Dutch motorcycles.
Here also the "wrong" Overijssel stamp.
And now the dilemma:
When compiling the catalogue, we always took the position that we would not include personal stamps, otherwise the book would become very thick. Should we include or not include these issues, produced and distributed in large numbers by the postal service itself? These are personal stamps with a personalized stamp frame, both here and abroad.
The NVPH (Dutch Association of Stamp Traders) has issued a special catalogue of these personal stamps and is working on an updated version, and regular internet catalogues are including them between the other issues.
I have already reluctantly started mentioning the motorcycle sheet and I think that, given the number of semi-official issues, I will not continue this way and will only report them in the Newsletters from now on.
Hans de Kloet
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