The Samlermærket Newsletters
The Danish printing firm of Andreasen & Lachmann (1911-1958) is widely regarded as one of the best printers of classic poster stamps during the “golden age” of poster stamps in the period before World War One, and they continued producing poster stamps into the 1950s.
When they embarked on a program to print a series of high quality “Samlermærker” (poster stamps) in 1912, they were determined to establish a rigorous standard for their stamps, and the program would follow certain guidelines. The print runs would be limited, each stamp would carry the logo or name of Andreasen & Lachmann with a guarantee of authenticity, and, above all, they would be held to a high standard for artistic and aesthetic quality.
In order to support their program, the firm set out to create a culture of collecting their poster stamps, which would make them even more attractive to the businesses who would order the stamps from them for advertising purposes. They produced a catalog of their own poster stamps, as well as albums into which collectors could mount their poster stamps.
An integral part of A&L’s plan included publishing a monthly newsletter to support the new hobby of poster stamp collecting. The newsletter, called “Samlermærket” (The Poster Stamp) would include articles of interest to collectors, plus listings and news of A&L’s own poster stamps, and every issue, which was six pages in length, would include several actual A&L poster stamps mounted in the newsletter. Samlermærket proved to be so popular after only a few issues, that the publishing schedule was expanded to two issues per month, issued on the first and the sixteenth of each month. Eventually, the number of stamps mounted in each issue was doubled. Between July 1913 and December 1915, A&L published 48 newsletters. They decided to stop publishing them because of the privations and supply chain issues brought about by World War One. When they stopped publishing Samlermærket, they had successfully supplied their readers with an example of every one of their numbered poster stamps that was part of their 1912-1914 series (not including different overprint or text version of the same basic stamp).
I first acquired several issues of Samlermærket many years ago, and always hoped to find more and translate them. I was finally able to acquire a complete run of all 48 newsletters, and I recently embarked on a project to not just translate them, but to create 48 documents that will show the original page on the left side, and a recreation of that page, translated into English, on the right side. Each issue will be a separate pdf, which the reader can view online or download to their own device. We will be offering the issues here, on a regular basis, until all 48 issues are completed. We would be happy to receive feedback from our readers with any comments about them.
– Ray Petersen
Below is issue no. 1 of the series, dated July 1913.
Samlermaerket_1913_01