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[Daniel A]

I made an LP purchase from a Swedish seller on Discogs and this beautiful package turned up, covered by a stock of old, low-value stamps.

 

 

Inside was Kenny Burrell's 'Night Song' LP.

[Rooster_Ties]

Lovely!  A fun sight, definitely.

[David Ayers]

Very nice. And makes me wish I’d kept - or kept a record of - more of the exotic mailings I’ve received over the years...

[Big Beat Steve]

2 hours ago, Daniel A said:

I made an LP purchase from a Swedish seller on Discogs and this beautiful package turned up, covered by a stock of old, low-value stamps.

 

 

Inside was Kenny Burrell's 'Night Song' LP.

Must be a hobby with some Swedish sellers.

Throughout my purchases from Sweden (mostly mags - as you know - but also records and catalogs) I received envelopes on 3 or 4 occasions that were plastered with older stamps (60s or so, maybe even earlier - some I recognized from my schoolkid collecting days during the late 60s/very early 70s), though never as many as yours on this one.

How far back can you go with using Swedish stamps that are still legal for use anyway?

 

Edited April 4, 2018 by Big Beat Steve

[Dan Gould]

I would hope that stamps are valid for the face value for as long as the country issuing them exists.

If this is common, I wonder how Swedish postmen feel about having to count up so many stamps of so many denominations to verify that the postage matches the cost.

[Big Beat Steve]

23 minutes ago, Dan Gould said:

I would hope that stamps are valid for the face value for as long as the country issuing them exists.

 

I don't suppose this necessarily is so. I remember receiving mail from the US in my stamp-collecting youngster days (c. 1970)  where the postage due was stuck on using decades-old stamps (on purpose, the letter went from one collector to another) but apart from that, things can vary widely. I know even in the post-1948 period when no monetary reforms took place anymore German stamps usually remained valid only for anything from 2 to 4 years. It was not until late 1969 IIRC that they would remain valid indefinitely in West Germany, and in fact in the late 1990s I often used very old stamps from the 70s/80s for my letters - but apart from some sent to a stamp-collecting friend from my car hobby over in the UK - only for the simple reason that I had HUGE stocks of unused stamps from my parents' stamp collecting days. Unfortunately most of these were not worth more than their denomination even among collectors so they got used up as best as I could before they became invalid for mailing when the EURO was introduced. And this must have happened in all the other Euro countries too.

I guess the denominations of older Swedish stamps will pose a real counting problem, though, given the inflation of past decades.

Edited April 4, 2018 by Big Beat Steve

[Daniel A]

I think you may use even very old stamps here still, albeit to nominal value. However, some years back they introduced these stamps with no nominal value other than they will be enough for one standard letter (and then two for larger letters, four for even bigger ones etc) and thus will not be affected by inflation.

A funny thing I just noted; the stamps on the far left somehow looked like jazz musicians in action on the picture above. I had to zoom in on the original picture to see what they were:

[Big Beat Steve]

I thought so too at first.

Looking closer, it's the various stages of producing glassware. Searching on the web, they date from 1972 and the denomination is 65 Öre. Now you'd certainly have to stick on a LOT of these to cover present-day rates.

[Brad]

Using old stamps is a good way to save money on postage. Perhaps the seller was a stamp collector and decided to use some of his collection for postage. 

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

3 hours ago, Dan Gould said:

I would hope that stamps are valid for the face value for as long as the country issuing them exists.

Certainly not the case here, either. When we decimalised from pounds shillings & pence to pounds and pence, all the old stamps went out.

Now we do what Daniel said - we have stamps with no nominal value but which are good for whatever class of post it says on them, so inflation be damned.

MG

[Daniel A]

3 hours ago, Big Beat Steve said:

 

How far back can you go with using Swedish stamps that are still legal for use anyway?

 

I just checked. Sweden got stamps in 1855, but there was a currency reform three years later so we can only use stamps from 1858 and later. Due to inflation, one would need 1440 of those to send a vinyl record domestically today... :-)

[Kevin Bresnahan]

I used up bunches of old US postage stamps when I was in my 20s. I was a stamp collector in my youth and somewhere in the 80's, Scott's value guide, the bible of stamp values, suddenly devalued every stamp in their catalog by 20%, claiming that they were now showing the real values since everyone took the Scott's value and discounted it by 20% anyway. Well, everyone still took that new discounted value and took 20% off to get the "buy" price, rendering many US stamps' value at less than face.

[JSngry]

I'll still get the odd mail with older stamps. Haven't seen any indication yet that their face value has any kind of an expiration date.