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COSMONAUTICS and SPACE AGE

CD 1962.jpg

Communists Pave the Way to Stars

 

Two souvenir sheets issued on Aug 20, 1964 in two variations: regular paper (first) with print run of 800,000 pcs. and varnished paper (second) with print run of 200,000 pcs. The design has been done by so-called LESEGRY team of three artists: Boris Lebedev, Leonard Sergeev and Mark Grinberg (the team's name was a combination of first letters of respective last names). The artists started to work together in 1957 mostly focused on Soviet propaganda posters with Zenith and Plakat (Poster) publishing houses, and from 1961 were involved in the design of numerous space stamp issues.

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Pskov "club" covers have quite a weird appearance in modern astrophilately. In most cases they look like being overprinted using serviced covers as most postmarks are not correlated to the specific events. Those covers mainly commemorate Gagarin flight, Space age and Cosmonautics day, though some other events can be found. Many of the covers are really messy, heading in several directions at the same time. It looks like that was a private venture of several people (namely Konstantin Zaytsev from Nizhny Novgorod and Valery Gulkov from Pskov) and not real “club” issues. I consider them awkward creatures but nevertheless like them for their unusual outfit.  

ISRAEL in SPACE .... 1961

 

One of the Israeli 'fairy tales' targeted to impress Egypt was of first Israeli space rocket launched on July 5, 1961. Widely reported in Israeli press the rocket called Shawit 2 or Shavit II (Heb. - 'שביט ב) was nothing more than a simple solid propellant single stage body similar to early meteorological rockets. Obviously there was no kind of space achievement but pure propaganda. All the details were highly classified till 1980s. To commemorate the event, Israeli Stamp Club issued special covers postmarked on the date of launch - 5.7.1961.

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