My grandfather was chemical engineer for an oil company back in the early 1940s, I believe, until he retired.  His job required him to travel all over the world and help get refineries set up, sometimes leaving my grandmother and my mother back in the states though they lived abroad with him quite often.  He was a frequent letter writer, as many people were back then before the internet and cheap international phone fees.

One of the things he and my grandmother would do is keep the stamps on the airmail they’d accumulate.  When he died I collected up a bunch of the things he collected which includes paper money and coins but also includes this big cache of world stamps.

I scanned the contents of a small book of stamps the other day and I’m trying to figure out what to do with them.  Maybe when I finish scanning all of em I’ll put them up on Flickr or something.  But for now they will reside on my computer.  I’ll share a few of them here on Tumblr, so expect to see some stamp related posts in the future.

Now, this particular stamp above is one from a series of stamps from the former Czechoslovakia, now the Czech Republic and Slovakia, in the early 60’s.  Out of many of the stamps I scanned, these Czech stamps I think are my favorite.  The content is particularly interesting; seeing the glorification of the space race from the communist side of things is actually pretty cool.  The quality of the artwork is just superb as well.

I’ll save my absolute favorite for another day, but for now, this is a pretty good one to get into things with.