A tale of postcards when stamps aren’t available

Aug 5, 2025, 8 AM

Philatelic Foreword by Jay Bigalke

A recent trip to the mailbox offered me a curious delight: two postcards, each from a friend on a journey — and each with a story of how stamps, the central artifact of our hobby, were absent. Yet, the messages they carried and the lengths taken to send them reminded me how philately is as much about human endeavor as it is about adhesives and cancellations.

The first card came from longtime philatelic traveler Chris Lazaroff, who had set his sights on visiting Greenland for a second year in a row. Chris is well known for his tradition of sending postcards from unusual locales, often with custom designs he creates for the journey. But Greenland, it seems, does not make it easy — especially on weekends.

“As I normally do, I produced a postcard for my Greenland cruise in 2024,” he wrote. “Unfortunately, due to ice flow and weather, we were unable to port there.” Undeterred, he booked the same cruise again in 2025 and came prepared with the same postcards and more research. He even reached out to Greenland Post (Tussas) for help with locating stamps at the planned ports.

This time, weather and ice once again foiled his plans to stop at the originally scheduled towns, but the ship made it to Nuuk, the capital, for a Saturday and Sunday stay. Chris made a beeline to the post office — closed, of course, for the weekend — and then visited more than half a dozen supermarkets, only to find none that sold stamps.

“I was disheartened,” he admitted, “but I still wanted to mail from Greenland, so I decided to write two cards, one to myself and one to Jay Bigalke, Linn’s editor.” In place of stamps, he penned the note: “Stamps not available on weekends” where postage should go and dropped the cards in the postbox outside the post office. Mine arrived. His did not. “Given the time since they were mailed, June 1,” he added, “I don’t have hope that I will receive mine.”

Chris is shown nearby with the mailbox he used along with the postcard that arrived in my mail.

That same day in the mail was a second postcard, this one from Lloyd de Vries, who sent it while aboard the Queen Mary 2 on a Cunard cruise. He, too, encountered postage-related peculiarities. Cunard offered free postcards to passengers (Lloyd may have been the only taker), then charged $1.60 per card to have them “posted” upon arrival in Southampton.

“The paperwork took about 20 minutes each time,” Lloyd wrote. “I didn’t send one to myself, so I can’t check this, but one of the other philatelic recipients pointed out that the actual postage was something like $4.30 USD at the current exchange rate. So either Cunard subsidized the difference — or I need to take a closer look at my onboard charges!”

He also noted a traditional British collection box near the ship’s grand foyer — though no one knew if it was actively serviced by Royal Mail. Adding to the philatelic flavor, he discovered two modest stamp displays aboard the ship: one in a looseleaf binder in the library and another tucked away in a little-used hallway on Deck 2.

In these tales of “mail without stamps,” I found everything that makes philately interesting: travel, friendship, and just enough mystery to keep us wondering what else might be out there to discover.

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