assorted French stamps on the one envelope
Last week I bought a dvd online from a seller at Rakuten. To my surprise, the dvd arrived in the envelope above, on which as you can see are twelve different vintage French stamps, dating from 1967 to 1999.
I was all the more surprised on observing that the stamps had, on November 4th 2019, all been franked at the post office - the postage of the package must be covered by the bar-coded label, so I suppose that someone at the post office was happy to play the expeditor's game and frank the old stamps as if they were still valid. The face values of the stamps total 38 francs and five centimes. I'm not sure how to convert that into modern currency but I'd guess at something like 40 euros. |
There aren't any traces of earlier frankings so the stamps must all have been mint.
I have no idea why the seller added these philatelic bonuses (boni?) to my purchase, but I know that I shall be very disappointed if any future online purchases, from whichever seller, don't come with similar supplements.
I have no idea why the seller added these philatelic bonuses (boni?) to my purchase, but I know that I shall be very disappointed if any future online purchases, from whichever seller, don't come with similar supplements.
Here, from the Delcampe site, are clearer images of the stamps, in chronological order. I particularly like the Cocteau Marianne image, and the extract from the Declaration of Rights:
You can access the seller's online shop at Rakuten here, if you want to see if he does this sort of thing for every sale. Actually, I think my seller missed a trick. The dvd I bought was of films by Marguerite Duras, and she of course was celebrated by the French post office with stamps and first day covers in 2014, the centenary of her birth. He could have thought to include one of these stamps in his creative assemblage: |
Or perhaps he could have included a stamp from Duras's youth in Indo-China:
(Perhaps I'm asking for too much.)