Recent purchases

[TotallyUncool]

You're right -- I do see some Aika!

[boinsie]

Haha, thanks. I've definitely gotten the Aika resemblance on here before.

But back to the coat! The exterior is corduroy, and 40% wool, so it's deceivingly warm!

[Zunu]

boinsie kawaii!!!!!!!!!!!1111!!!

カイは「いい」！！

closeenoughhehehehehe

[CaptainBerryzGiraffe]

Lookin' good!
I definitely see the Aika (and you also look like one of my great aunts weirdly enough >.>)
...
Dat coat... you look stylish wearing it! I envy because I can't look stylish in anything. xD

[Moh]

I needed a calendar for next year, so I got this very cute one on Amazon:

[erilaz]

A couple of old postcards written in Volapük that I bought on eBay arrived today:




The top one is from the Netherlands, written and mailed on New Year's Day in 1888, which makes it the oldest Volapük postcard in my collection. The bottom one is from Finland, written in 1889. These are my first Volapük postcards from these countries.

It's been an amazing month for Volapük postcards on eBay. There was one from Amoy, China, up for auction, but it got too rich for my blood, ending up at around $200. But in addition to the two that arrived today, I managed to find (and buy at affordable prices) one from Belgium from 1895 and one from Suriname (!) from 1897.

[erilaz]

Another old postcard from eBay….

I had already bought a few old postcards of the R.M.S. Aquitania, the ship that brought my grandmother to America in 1924, but now I also have one of the S.S. Martha Washington, the ship that brought my grandfather over in 1911:

[erilaz]

Today I got four more pieces of Esperanto postal history from eBay for my collection. All four were mailed to the same Esperantist in Bulgaria: (1) a postcard from Australia with the postmark of the 82nd World Congress of Esperanto (Adelaide, 1997); (2) a postcard from China, commemorating and bearing the imprint of the 89th World Congress (Beijing, 2004); (3) an envelope from Canada containing a greeting card, both bearing imprint and poster stamp of the 69th World Congress (Vancouver, 1984); and (4) a postcard written in Esperanto from Vietnam (1991).

Earlier this month I got another interesting piece for the collection: an envelope bearing an Esperanto inscription and Esperanto labels, sent in 1932 to Australia from Togo. This is the first item I've managed to get for the collection that was mailed from any country in Africa, though I already had a couple of postcards mailed from the U.S. to South Africa in 1919. Esperanto has found relatively few adherents in Africa (it is the only continent apart from Antarctica that has never hosted the World Congress), and the fact that the sender had an African name (S.B. Anomah) and was not just a European colonial makes the cover from Togo that much more unusual.

I made one more really great score for the collection this month: an envelope from 1968 bearing the commemorative postmark of the 50th anniversary of the Newcastle upon Tyne Esperanto Society and the autographs of the President of that society, the President of the British Esperanto Association, and the President of the Universala Esperanto-Asocio (Ivo Lapenna, an important figure in the history of the Esperanto movement). Also included are autographed letters from the first two individuals. And it only cost me twelve bucks and change.

[erilaz]

My latest eBay purchase just arrived in today's mail:



It's a Korean stamp from 1946, commemorating the 500th anniversary of Hangul, the Korean alphabet, which was published in the Hunmin Jeongeum on 9 October 1446. Korea was just barely able to issue such a stamp, since the newly liberated country had only started issuing its own stamps (under American occupation) earlier that same year. Such a stamp would never have been issued in 1945 under Japanese rule.

Hangul fascinates me. It displays a linguistic sophistication not seen in any other script in general use as the official writing system of a nation-state, even though it was created in the 15th century. A few scripts invented in the West have a somewhat similar "featural" structure, whereby certain phonetic similarities between sounds are reflected by graphic similarities in the corresponding characters, including Francis Lodwick's Universall Alphabet (1686), Sir Isaac Pitman's shorthand (1837), and Alexander Melville Bell's Visible Speech (1867), not to mention J.R.R. Tolkien's various Elvish writing systems (beginning in 1919). But Hangul preceded even the earliest of these by over two centuries.

[erilaz]

I spent too much at the WESTPEX stamp show this weekend, mostly filling gaps in my U.S. album. I also picked up a few old picture postcards that I found particularly interesting or attractive. Here's my favorite of the lot, a hundred-year-old card showing cute Japanese girls playing karuta: