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Lloyd's Fun FDCs Gallery

Some first day covers with French stamps by Virtual Stamp Club members, celebrating
Bastille Day 2006:

Click Pictures for Larger View

"There was a big selection of postmarks available in Britain including one with Concorde so our cachet incorporates the flags, the tower and Big Ben, and Concorde," writes Ian Billings of Norvic Philatelics of this FDC from 2004.. The launch of the ocean liner Queen Mary 2 gave Norvic another opportunity for a British-French combination. "The French issued a stamp for the launch and we already knew of the British stamps to be issued 4 months later, so the cachet was designed with doubling in mind, before we even knew what the British stamps would look like and what postmarks would be available," Ian says.
American cachetmaker Dave Bennett of Bennett Cachetoons thinks these are the only FDCs he's ever serviced with French stamps: "The two covers are for the 2002 release of the Happy Birthday stamp, which happened to fall on Jules Verne's birthday. The first cover is a combo with a French issue showing Verne and a scene from '20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,'" Dave writes. "The second cover is 'comboed' with two French semi-postals to benefit the Red Cross, one depicting a moment from 'Five Weeks in a Balloon,' the other, '20,000 Leagues ' again. Both of these French stamps were issued in 1982."
The last U.S.-French joint issue was for the Statue of Liberty's centennial in 1986. Although I obtained all sorts of other postmarks that July 4th — Liberty, N.Y., Soap Opera Festival Station, among others, even Philadelphia's annual 4th of July pictorial — of course I serviced some of my Dragon Cards with the two countries' stamps. But I also had some leftover unserviced Frederic Bartholdi Dragon Cards from the year before. Bartholdi was the sculptor who designed the Statue, so I serviced some of the cards with the 1986 U.S. and French Statue of Liberty stamps, and some with those two stamps plus the Bartholdi stamp.

One reason there haven't been any U.S.-French joint issues in the past 20 years is that the U.S. Postal Service felt that France's La Poste was uncooperative in 1986.

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Lloyd A. de Vries
©2006 de Vries Philatelic Media


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