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On August 12, 1913, Credit Leona Bank sent a business postcard to one of its customers in the city of Trabzon in northeastern Turkey. A stamp was affixed to the postcard with a Perfin of the initials of the bank, a measure against petty theft by the company’s employees. This is one of the only known copies of the Perfined stamp that survived on a postal item.
On August 13, 1984, the United States Post Office issued a stamp dedicated to the image of Smokey the bear, the symbol of the fight against forest fires. The stamp was printed for the first time on a state-of-the-art printing press that combines offset printing and indentation printing.
Typically, issuing a new postage stamp is a process that takes many months, and requires many approvals and many coordinations with all the parties involved in the creation process. Immediately after the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the Philatelic Service acted quickly and harnessed all others to issue the stamp within one month of the assassination.
A printed watermark is not a real watermark, but an imitation that attempts to simulate a watermark that is embossed into the body of the paper. In an attempt to find a cheap alternative to paper with a watermark embossed in it during the manufacturing process, New Zealand Post in 1925 printed the letters NZ with a star below them on the back of the stamp. The printing was done in a transparent color that looked like a watermark.
An envelope sent on the island of Trinidad documents an attempt by the local charity to collect donations for the Red Cross during World War I. The course of events turned this activity into a philatelic curiosity.
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