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TRAINS on POSTAL STATIONERY ALGERIA

Letter Card - No indicium - date? Aerial view of Oran (seaport city in NW Algeria) with train tracks and ?? This is an odd item. The inscription "Postes Algérie" seems to indicate that it was an official product, but there is no preprinted indicium. Yet there is a mint stamp affixed (Sc. 95, iss. 1936), as though it had to be purchased this way. No, the stamp is not covering an indicium. Certainly it would have been more economical for Algerian Post to print such cards with no postage and add it when they were sold, eliminating the need for separate cards for diffferent rates, or new printings as rates changed. Can any viewer of this page provide the facts behind this item? 1/16/2005 - per Bill Weinberger: "It was issued by the post office with stamp affixed-- It's the proper rate." 1/22/2005 - Horst Brix: We had a discussion about this item in my local stamp club, and all members agreed that this is not postal stationery. It is what we call in German "ein Poststück", which would be translated a postal piece. Postal pieces are everything which has been issued officially by the Post. The Postal pieces have several subsets, one of which is the stationery, called in German "Ganzsache". This German word shows better what is meant: Ganzsache means the total piece is only one item. To differentiate the stationery from other postal pieces, it has been defined that a postal stationery has to have an imprinted value. Postal pieces with affixed values are not stationeries.

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