Today’s blog is honoring September 11, 2001.  You can probably recall where you were when you heard the news.  Fourteen years later and I find that my scrapbook six page layout made from photographing images off of the television live that day as events unfolded still has just a little journaling along side the images.

To receive these four covers from my stamp club friend via email to share are special.  They were made for a philatelic commemoration he did for the 10th Anniversary in 2011. 

On a future blog post I will go into describing what’s involved to get special pictorial cancels with the US Postal Service but for today I wanted to have them speak for themselves. 

He personally designed and printed four different cachets (that’s the artwork) on the left side of the cover (envelope) and sent them for pictorial postmarks offered in New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.   The heavy black borders around the cachets are reminiscent of the black borders of “mourning” envelopes popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  Thank you to my stamp club friend (aka cachet designer of today’s showcased images) at the Wilmington Philatelic Society  for permission to include these images in today’s blog post.

Heroes of 2001 Stamp

About the stamp shown today – image upper left is of the “Heroes of 2001” semi-postal stamp issued on June 7, 2002 in New York, New York by the U.S. Postal Service.   “In honor of the American heroes who responded to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Heroes of 2001 semi-postal stamps offered the public a way to assist families of injured or killed emergency relief personnel.”  @PostalMuseum. 

Today I am not closing my blog post with my usual sign-off but instead am closing with revered silence.