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A lot happened in 2024! It has been a terrific year for my Vatican stamp collecting activities and for the Vatican Philatelic Society (VPS) and its website. We began the year working on slideshows for the Vatican Stamp Day. This has evolved into the creation of the weekly slideshow button that now appears on the Daily Emails. Spring of 2024 included a trip to Rome and an opportunity to visit the Vatican Post Office. This is an area of Vatican City not generally open to the public, so this was an rare opportunity to get some unique photographs. Contacts with people from the Vatican Post Office were established, which in turn led to the discovery of how to obtain first-day covers directly from the Vatican Post Office. The trip eventually led to writing an article for Vatican Notes. Summer work included getting the process of obtaining Vatican first day covers working properly and spending a lot of time preparing for Vatican Stamp Day. We also started communicating with the American Philatelic Society (APS) and the American Philatelic Research Library (APRL). I have been working to upload historical issues of Vatican Notes into the APRL on-line digital library. We also worked out the technical arrangements of uploading the Vatican Notes index records to the APRL system. Fall finally came and we got to go to the Spellman Museum. At the Museum I learned a lot about Roman States covers and discovered the Vatican stamp pages of Cardinal Spellman. It was so much fun to meet other VPS members face to face and to actually meet with other Vatican stamp collectors! I took up the challenge of coming up with the ability to produce album pages similar to those of Cardinal Spellman. This forced me to finally catch up on several years of stamp mounting and improved my personal album design and layouts. This also resulted in several slideshows where VPS members can download these album pages for their own use. Late fall 2024 has proven a bit of a challenge to Vatican stamp collectors as the Vatican CFN sales website has been closed. We have now learned, from contacts made in the spring, that Vatican CFN sales will resume in January 2025, and we can now look forward to purchasing the rest of our 2024 postal items. All in all, the activities of the Vatican Philatelic Society has kept me real busy in 2024, and 2025 promises a lot more to come. I encourage other VPS members to actively participate in the many things that go on behind the scenes at the VPS: writing articles for Vatican Notes. working on the website team and creating the Daily Email publications, and much more. There is a lot happening and all are welcome to come and take part in the activities of the Vatican Philatelic Society. It is very rewarding and your stamp collection will improve tremendously! Drop us an email! |
