Lettering

1998: |History of the Letter

Lot of fonts on this stamp, I count five, as Pheidippides sets off on his run from the Battle of Marathon to Athens.  It is all downhill from here

1992: 350th Anniversary of the Civil War (Design - Jeremy Sancha)

and another battle, or in this case a lot of them in the English Civil War

Why the little squiggly things at the end?  I don't know the significance perhaps it is to make the text a block although at the back of my mind I seem to remember that in the past there were no punctuation marks, as we know them today, to divide sentences.  No mention of them in an article about the stamp design here.

1930: International Colonial Exposition, Paris (Design Louis Regal; Engraver Abel Mignon)

I love the art deco vibe in these French stamps and indeed it is a style associated with the art of Louis Regal, artist, sculptor and mosaicist.

1935: German Rail Centenary (Design - Karl Diebitsche)

I also like a Blackletter or Gothic typeface (in this case Fraktur) and here it comes with the Flying Hamburger, Germany's first fast diesel train (the fastest railway connection in the world in 1935).

1947-48 Definitive (Design - Hopfner)

A pared down blackletter issued by the Allied Occupation in Germany showing an allegory of Germany reaching for Peace (there were 21 definitives).  In theory all the zones had to use the same stamps after 1945, which was generally true apart from the French zone which liked to produce its own issues.  The postmark of Demmin  is in North East Germany which was the Soviet Zone (Postal District 37/38).

Gill Sans

Sunday Stamps II theme this week is - Fonts and Typefaces - read more at See It On A Postcard