Home -> What's New

  • 11-13, 20 May 2012: added or replaced almost 30 of the 1200 dpi images and made several smaller changes. A few more may still needed.
  • 9 May 2012: Updated some of the Polish-English Philatelic dictionary material
  • 3 May 2012:
    1. One of the links (The Jewish Gen "Shtetl link" on Przedbórz: http://www.shtetlinks.jewishgen.org/Kolbuszowa/kolbuszowa2/Przedborz1.htm) has been removed because it is about a different Przedbórz -- the one in/near Gmina Kolbuszowa.
    2. Corrected the spelling of the suburb across the bridge: it should probably have been Widoma, not Widama. (The Yiskor book, Słownik Geograficznya, a recent road map, and the 1929 business directory all spell it Widoma.) One photo used "Widama". (Only the text was changed, not file names.)
  • 18-25 Apr 2012: Started added medium-compressed 1200 dpi images at the request of Morten Munck. A few are not yet available, and they have only been spotted-checked, so there could be some which have been mis-identified. Some links may be broken while I was loading the images.
  • 12 Apr 2012: Added a link to Mapywig, the Map Archive for the Military Geographical Institute of Poland. Thanks to Ken Entin for telling me of this site. Added or revised other links, and moved some to the internet philately page
  • 16 March 2012: Added rudimentery "quick start guides" to the top of the home page and the identifier home page.   Also added a column to the page of stamps by issue to show the eagle, arc, ray and sheaf stamp categories.
  • 11 March 2012: Added links to the Museum of Family History. Thanks to Ken Entin for suggesting it.
  • 3 Feb. 2012: Expanded the Ferro Meridian discussion and added it to the site map.
  • 29 Jan., 5 Feb. 2012: Started a more-detailed commentary on Hubka [2003]  (Moved to a separate page and added to the site map, 5 Feb. 2012).   Comments will be added gradually over time.
  • 25-26 Jan. 2012: The Synagogue footnote 2 has been expanded by
    1. reinstating the Zeek link to Joyce Ellen Weinstein's Lithuanian synagogue essay and adding some more material about her;
    2. adding a reference in footnote 2b to David Gelernter's review of Hubka's book. The review was published in the Winter 2012 issue of the Jewish Review of Books.
    Additional items have been added to the non-philatelic bibliography and some information and speculations about Yehuda Leib, the painter.
  • 17-22 Jan. 2012: Added a cross-reference of major catalog numbers and other catalog-listed varieties. These were prompted by a question from Polonus member Richard Piotrowski, who asked about Fischer 9A, and I had to find a catalog to know how 9A is perforated.
  • 15 Jan. 2012: Added a link to my column in Issue 545 of the Bulletin of the Polonus Philatelic Society.
  • 25-8 Dec. 2011: Some pages didn't load properly in some browsers. In particular, on my laptop, the "town across the river photo" in the "town map" section,
    The problem was an unmatched comment tag in the header. Moral: Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera are more forgiving browsers than the others.
  • 22-23 Dec. 2011: Fixed lots of broken links and identified others with . Both Linkchecker 7.2 and W3C were used. Many broken URLs are still shown, so you may possibly find where I got the info by using the Wayback machine (internet archive), or something similar.  (I have yet not tried it.)  (But all broken links I have found to date have been removed, or are no longer shown as active hyperlinks, but just as text.)
  • 18 Dec. 2011: Installed Linkchecker 7.2 free link-checking software. Seems to work well. But I need a symbol to indicate broken links. Will try for now.
  • 13-27 Nov. 2011: Much of the Przedbórz Philatelic History section was rewritten based on Roman Harmel's reading of the Abramsohn and Franczak bios in the Przedbórz Biographical Dictionary (PSB).

    Also revised the genuine Mi2 twice line-perfed on top description based on Roman Sobus's translation of the Berbeka certificate.
  • 16 Oct. 2011: Added some scans and info from a Gärtnuer Christoph Auktionshaus auction listing: Issue 1 bisect registered cover, Issue 2 4gr. cover, Issue 3 4gr. cover. Thanks to Roman Sobus for telling me of this auction.
  • 3 Oct. 2011: Added a scan of a genuine Mi2 twice line-perfed on top. Also discovered that sometimes diacritic marks aren't displayed at all. I probably forgot to specify UTF-8 encoding on some web pages.
  • 2 Oct. 2011: Started cleaning up broken links again. This will take quite awhile.
  • 23-25 Sept. 2011:
  • 12 Sept. 2011: New Przedbórz bridge cancel substituted for a Non-Przedbórz example. (With thanks to Unca' Joetoshop.)
  • 27 June 2011: The fourth occasional Przedbórz website award winners are long-time Polonus member Roman Harmel and his friends Zdzislaw and Marek Porawski.
  • 24 Oct. 2010: Added a #3 freak, thanks to Hagen Hanke.
  • 18-19 Oct. 2010: Made a few changes and corrections to the Eagle Stamp Identifier, as well as small changes to several other z.
  • 13 Oct. 2010: Added a new bibliography item, Senf [1919], describing the first mention of how to separate forgeries from genuine "Eagle" stamps. Also added an additional note about Gebrüder Senf, provided by my Berliner friend, Hagen Hanke. About six other pages have been changed since the last "What's New" posting.
  • 8 Sept. 2010: Reorganized the top of the translation page, adding a table of contents, so to speak, and added some preliminary comments on bab.la, an up-and-coming language portal. (Subsequent discussions have identified the need for a complete rewrite of the translation section, but that won't happen for a few months.)
  • 15 August 2010: Added scan of a postcard showing the Pilica river bridge, probably in the 1930's. Changes have been made to about 16 pages since the prior What's New posting.
  • 25 July 2010: Added the coordinates of Poland's other three Przedbórz's.
  • 18 July 2010: Added links to PDFs of my columns in the Polonus Bulletin and made a zillion small changes in other places.
  • 9 July 2010: Added a list of precursors of the S-P-P (Society for Polish Philately in Great Britain).
  • 7 July 2010: Slightly reorganized the thanks and acknowledgments section.
  • 2 July 2010: Added a list of backlinks, and a discussion of them in web stuff. Also discovered that about 20% of this site's 200+ content webpages have been modified or created within the past 90 days; 60% between 90 days and 2 years; and 20% have not changed in the past two years. Put another way, 6% of the content pages are unchanged from 2007, 21% from 2008, 43% from 2009, and 30% are new or changed in 2010. (In all fairness, a "change" might be only a spelling correction.)
  • 24-27 June 2010: added some links and repaired or annotated others after running the W3C link checker.
  • 20 June 2010: Added a misperforated Mi 18 image to the freaks and oddities section, as well as an explanation of the Senf advertising postcard. The latter was updated on 12 July 2010; the former on 16 July 2010..
  • 18 May 2010: Revised the translation section (still in process), including adding 20+ common words. Many smaller changes have also been made.
  • 15 Apr. 2010: Added some more details about genuine Mi4 type 2 stamps.
  • 25 Mar. 2010: Added a better image of the Senf postcard advertising their 1907 catalog, as described in the Gebrüder Senf discussion.
  • 18-21 Mar. 2010: Added a better image of a Russian 157 Przedbórz cancel, and a translation of the first forgery warning. Added some links and a discussion of Gebrüder Senf as well.
  • 17 Mar. 2010: Added questions related to Przedbórz horses and beer.
  • 21 Feb. 2010: Added some links to multilingual philatelic dictionaries.
  • 15 Jan. 2010: Added the first forgery warning to the main philatelic history page, and corrected an error in which another content page had been posted to the philatelic history main page by mistake.
  • 3 Jan. 2010: Added some information on Freefind as well as its advanced search feature.
  • 30 Dec. 2009: Corrected erroneous images of Mi 6 F1 & F4 forgeries on the page that shows Mi 6 genuine and forged stamps. Also made numerous changes (mostly to Issue 2 varieties) as a result of information received from Michael Lenke.
  • 20 Dec. 2009: Slightly revised the Mi 1 type 2 upper left distinctions, and added a quick navigation table to the Eagle Stamp introduction page.
  • 18 Dec. 2009: Added some features of genuine #1, type 5 stamps which I hadn't noticed before.
  • 7 Dec. 2009: I got tired of navigating to the pages I wanted, so I added a bunch of commonly used shortcuts to the side frame of the home page. Let me know if this helps or hinders (or simply makes no difference).
  • 6 Dec. 2009: Started adding a list of sites related to internet philately, with no attempt at completeness.
  • 3 Dec. 2009: Revised the "left wing dots" discussion to include F5's and more about Mi2 F2's.
  • 29 Nov. 2009: Started using Krakow as standard spelling instead of Cracow (originally Austrian, now common English spelling1) or Kraków (standard Polish spelling).  Krakow was chosen based on comments received from eleven Polonus officers and members.  Cracow is still used when a document being quoted spells it that way.
  • 22-27 Nov. 2009: Started adding more images of covers to the rates and usage section. My goal is to have an image of every rate for every issue, but that won't happen unless you, the user, help.

    Revised the description of double-sided proofs, based on conversations at ChicagoPex 2009 with Hank Bieniecki and Zbigniew Korzeń.
  • 20 Nov. 2009: Added alternative possibilities to the discussion of forgery perforations, as well as the discussion of how the forgeries were originally produced, both prompted by a conversation at ChicagoPex 2009 with Ray Simpson of the UK's Great Britain Philatelic Society.
  • 13 Nov. 2009: Added the multicolored Mi 16 F5 as an item in Freaks and Oddities; Added some secondary characteristics to Mi 12 Type 2.
  • 25 Oct. 2009: Started adding data on perforations. Also added some secondary characteristics on Mi 2 (4 gr. Eagle stamps), types 5 and 8.
  • 18 Sept. 2009: Some (all?) links into the middle of tables such as bibliographies use named anchors, which often don't work, I just discovered.
  • 17 Sept. 2009: Added/updated some links and an introduction to the translate section. Bottom line: use Google™ Language Tools.
  • 13-16 Sept. 2009: Started repairing many broken links. This required removing some entries from the Links page. See Web Stuff for some fragments about how to check links. Remind me to check links more often, so I don't have so many repairs. Oy!
  • 11-13 Sept. 2009: Reorganized the technical stuff webpages (although that may be invisible to the user), and moved most of the miscellany to more appropriate places in Varieties. The site map was also changed to be consistent with the new tech stuff organization.
  • 3-6 Sept. 2009: Added some information about the WWI fighting around Przedbórz.
    Reorganized the Links section, adding links to Austrian and German Philatelic Societies and to World War I Military History sites.
    Reorganized the Occasional Awards listings, and announced the 2nd Occasional Awards.
    Added some comments about animals and musical instruments as synagogue decorations.
  • 16 August 2009: I put some Cyrillic text on the Philatelic History Page, but it seemed to take a few days to display properly in many browsers. (I have no idea why there was a delay.)
  • 30 July 2009: Started to manually add "last modified date" at the bottom of website pages when changes are made. I thought it could be done automatically with some easy Javascript code, but the hosting service doesn't pass the required info to the browser.
  • 15 July 2009: Added discussion of a Provocative Cover apparently send by Abramsohn to himself.
  • 11 June 2009: Corrected an error in the Henry IV charter description, noticed by Steve Scher. A number of smaller changes have been made since the end of March.
  • 29 Mar. 2009: Consolidated the reasons Przedbórz local delivery stamps must have been a philatelic endeavor with some actual postal use.
  • 13-22 Mar. 2009:
  • 1 Mar. 2009:
  • 1 Feb. 2009: Added information about the newly-discovered or rediscovered Eagle F5 forgeries.
  • 4 Jan. 2009: Fixed Freaks and Oddities side navigation bar to better distinguish between actual links and places-holders for future discoveries. (Thanks to Dr. Josh Kayman for pointing out that I had forgotten to fix this.)
  • 26 Dec. 2008: Added a draft section on types of post offices in the Russian zone (1815-1915.)
  • 11-14 Dec. 2008: Added some material on Kingdom of Poland 4-Ring cancels, courtesy of Leon Finik and David Skipton. Also added links to other stamp societies.
  • 5 Dec. 2008: Reorganized Freaks & Oddities section to accommodate an unusual #7 scan provided by Bernard Paull.
    Also reorganized the top navigation frame.
  • 30 Oct. 2008: Removed all references to "download (old) PDF." The PDF's are too old, and the images are not print-resolution.
  • 3-7 Oct. 2008: Added links to Mapofpoland.net's many photos of town: the Przedborz photo gallery. Also updated the review of machine translation sites, and added some scans of covers to the rates and usage page.
  • 14 Sept. 2008: Added a scan of a full sheet of #18C, a constant-variety flaw in #15F1, and pane size of certain forgeries.
  • 3 Sept. 2008: Added a short note about Stanley Kronenberg, whose Przedbórz collection scans will be a source of new information for the next several months.
  • 27 August 2008: Moved the "selected new items" from the home page to this "what's new" page, with apologies to Ben Nieborg, who uses that format on his excellent Stamp Encyclopaedia Poland website. Also continued adding information from Stanley Kronenberg's scans.
  • 4 August 2008: In the forgery cross-reference for Issue II, the F4 and F5 cross-references to Barefoot were wrong and have been corrected.
  • 28 July 2008: Added Alan Blunt's forgery families, and started listing Kronenberg's as well.
  • 27 July 2008: Added a portion of the synagogue wall painting, showing the musical instruments.
  • 23 July 2008: Announced the First Przedborz Website Awards for suggestions and information pertaining to this website. Also revised the Issue 6-8 discussion several times in the past several weeks.
  • 11 June 2008: Added a site map for the History and Geography Sections, because they are getting rather complex and messy.
  • 25 May 2008: Added Freefind site search to the top navigation bar. Also added a website technical stuff section to describe some of the stuff that I have gone through since this website went live.
  • 15 May 2008: Added a preview section about Polish Jewish Charters, with translations and comparisons of the 1264 charter vs. certain others, a lengthy list of various other charters, and reaffirmation examples. This is still in process.
  • 11 May 2008: Added a discussion of what may be the furthest known delivery of a postal item with a Przedbórz local delivery stamp. (Click on the preceding link; when you get there, click on the line just below "you are here".)
  • 22 April 2008: Added a consolidated list of the questions buried throughout the website, and some new items in the links (primarily the PSGA links and WorldLingo's list of on-line or downloadable Polish dictionaries).

    • Footnotes:
    1. Per email from Jim Mazepa, 15 Nov. 2009.

    Last modified 20 May 2012