Pony express tried to ‘shave a day away,’ telegraph cancel mysteries: Inside Linn’s

By Charles Snee

No doubt you’ve read our report this week about the latest United States counterfeit stamp to appear in the marketplace. That story and numerous others await you in the Sept. 11 issue of Linn’s Stamp News that will go in the mail to subscribers Monday, Aug. 28. If you’re a digital subscriber, you get early access Saturday, Aug. 26. To tide you over until your copy arrives, we offer this trio of teasers. Happy collecting!

Are you familiar with the Special Pony Express of Fridley, Minnesota?

In this month’s The Odd Lot column, Wayne Youngblood takes us all the way back to Nov. 23, 1964, when the small Minnesota town inaugurated its own pony express to protest the lack of a local post office. This “publicity stunt,” as Youngblood calls it, “owed its genesis to an offhand political misstatement.”

A passionate pursuit of British telegraph cancels yields a delightful surprise

In his quest to unravel some of the mysteries behind Victorian-era telegraph cancels, Great Britain Philately columnist Matthew Healey reaps a pleasant bonus — friendship with a pair of collectors who share his fascination with these intriguing markings.

The Yugoslavia and Macedonia postal tax stamps that memorialize a devastating 1963 earthquake

A feature common to the designs of some of these stamps is the clock from the Skopje train station, the hands of which are frozen at 5:17 a.m., the exact time at which the earthquake occurred. Rick Miller discusses this and more in this month’s Stamps of Eastern Europe column.

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