Classic German Poster stamps

ABOUT THESE PAGES

I have been collecting poster stamps for at least twenty years now, and maintain a web site about stamp collecting - alphabetilately.org.

About five years ago, in 2009, I was delighted to find the web pages of a collector who called himself just FRANK, of Cologne Germany. He displayed wonderful material I had never seen before, especially in such completeness - full sets of scarce, hard-to-find poster stamps from the early 1900's advertising long-extinct products and stores in elaborate, full-color designs of amazing artistry.

Recently I decided to see if Frank had added to his pages, and found to my dismay that they no longer existed. Fortunately, I had saved copies of the pages, and found an email address, so I fired off a message, asking where the pages had gone.

Alas, he did not reply.

I cannot allow this wonderful resource to die, so I am providing on my own site these copies of Frank's pages. I have reformatted them a little to suit my own style, but the main text and images are all as I found them.

If you are the original owner of these pages, or know where I can reach him, please contact me at:

Bill Senkus, Concord, CA - June 15, 2014

7/27/17 - I received the following email from Nick Follansbee, stamp dealer, expert on the stamps of Mexico, and a dedicated poster stamp collector:

I was very happy to find your archived version of Frank's poster stamp blog which I assumed had been lost forever. Thank you!

The material shown is from the great collection of Hugo-Heinz Welder which was bought by Frank and Britta Perschke about a dozen years ago. Some of these items are unique or nearly so. This is especially true of the artist promotion stamps of Hollerbaum & Schmidt of which there were two series. The second series is not so rare and stamps from it often sell in the $25-$35 range, but the first series is extremely rare and the imperforate ones are believed to be unique, as is also the case with the perforated Klinger with the devil drilling the head - a great classic.

Welder was actively collecting in the 1960s and died around 2005. His passion was the work of the great German commercial artists, and he did a lot of pioneering work in attributing. His chief collegues and rivals were Hans Koenig (collection now in a museum), Alfons Brunner (collection bought by Kiddle), Peter-Hannes Lehmann (collection sold to Kiddle), Manfred Zollickhofer (collection bought by Kiddle). Hateau was another (I'm not sure of the spelling, here). Anyway, these five collectors were the pioneer researchers, and Charles Kiddle built mightily on that foundation to produce his marvelous catalogues.

Frank Perschke's choices of artists to feature in his blog were usually apt - Bernhard, Klinger, Scheurich were obvious. It seemed to me that Erdt and maybe Gipkens were also treated in the original blog. Welder's collection of those two was superlative. The showing of Rumpf is pretty impressive. A few of the others were less impressive than some of the outstanding material not included in the blog. But overall it is stunning.

Thanks, Nick! I have bought poster stamps from the Perschkes (dba "papierundpappe" and "reklamemarken" on eBay), but failed to make the connection when I saw these pages. I have emailed then to ask why they dropped the blog, and see if they would like to contribute additional material.