Being someone unable to discern hiragana from katakana it is a rather hard task finding bibliophilatelistic material like the one shown above within the japanese issueing history. But luckily there are catalogues and our friends from Scott inform us that the shown example appreciates the opening of the “Library of Modern Japanese Literature” in Tokyo’s Komaba Park, which is rather a museum. Scott Number is 906, issue date was April 11th 1967.
It is not all about books anymore in library world. Therefore one may think about expanding library-related philately on other media-types shown on stamps. The WIRED magazine has a nice gallery on Computers on Stamps. My favorite is the one from Micronesia showing IBM-Founder Thomas J. Watson – from who I don't know whether he is related to Desk Set's Bunny Watson – in front of classical bookstacks. Obviously the Micronesian postal administration should have done some more research because they put a slightly different name on the stamp…
The stamp I want to introduce today takes us to the place where not only Danube and Save merge, viz Београд or Belgrade. Right there the National Library of Serbia was founded in 1832 short after Serboa became an autonoumos prinicpality within the Ottoman Empire. (more on the library’s history can be found here). In 1972 the Yugoslavian post administration issued a postage stamp honoring the 140th anniversary of this presumably oldest serbian cultural institution. The reason for not waiting to the 150th anniversary in 1982 was the then anon coming of the new library building by Ivo Kurtovic located at the Vračarski plato, that was officially openend april 6th 1973.
The stamp itself comes rather plain at the first view and contains some stripes-pattern which did not really gain beauty by means of digitization. However I think the image is still giving a good impression what it is about. Issue date was november 25th 1972. The face value is 0.50 dinar. The German Michel-Catalogue lists the issue as No. 1486 and counts a stamp quantity of 1996108. In the Scott’s list it runs under No. 1119. Color is said to be chocolate.
There is a new postage stamp in my bibliophilatelic collection I want to introduce. It is a so called “Europa”-Stamp. This issue-series goes back to the 1950s and fosters the idea of having a philatelic counterpart regarding to the evolving european identity. The newest issue picking up the topic “integration” (i.e. the German issue) was put out just yesterday.The chosen subject in 1987 was “Modern Architecture” and while the German postal administration put some pavilion by Mies van der Rohe and the Köhlbrand-Bridge in Hamburg on stamp, the swedish post office picked unerringly the famous “library cylinder” by Gunnar Asplund in Stockholm in 1928 to represent the country’s recent architectual development. There are two versions of the stamp: the shown green/orangebrown one having a face value of 3.10 SEK (Mi.No. 1429, Scott No. 1629 and one in black and green face valued 2.10 SEK Mi.No. 1428, Scott No. 1628).
The engraving was made by Zlatko Jakus after outines made by Hans Kündig and Bengt Sernander. Issue day was the 14th of may.
The additional stamp shows the Markuskyrkan built by Sigurd Lewerentz in the latter 1950s. (Mi.Nr. 1430, Scott Nr. 1630).
Bibliophilately 