Korea Stamp Society

With all the recent publications on the 1930s/1940s Christmas seals on the KSS website by Robert Finder one might forget that these Christmas seals are not only interesting from a historical point of view. They are actually still around, being published every year! However, most publicity is available only to a Korean speaking audience. To […]

[“COVERS FLEW OVER THE LAND OF MORNING CALM”] On November 15, 1991, Asiana Airlines, South Korea’s second international carrier, inaugurated flight between Seoul and Los Angeles. No first flight covers (FFCs) are known to exist for the return flight as philatelic recognition from United States Postal Service was not requested by Asiana Airlines according to […]

This is a short refresher course on the 1895 Taegeuk series and the differences between the first and second printings. After the first short-lived attempt to issue postage stamps in 1884, Korea would not issue postage stamps again until 1895. The first postage stamps to be issued in ten years by Korea had the taegeuk […]

The greatest difficultly in studying DPRK stamps is that reliable references are very limited in number, and the information available might be incomplete or even incorrect. Some stamps are without images in catalogues, some are unissued; and once in a while, collectors may surprisingly find something they have never seen or known before. However, it […]

Recently I acquired a Japanese postcard displaying a map of Korea divided into sections (agriculture, communication, rail, and shipping). Since I can’t read Japanese, is there a way to translate the writing. The card was sent to Shanghai and has a pictorial red cancel with Shanghai receiving post mark.

It has been known for some time that the DPRK had numerous stamps designed that were numbered in the Korea Stamp Corporation’s DPRK Stamp Catalogue. Some of these items were illustrated as unissued stamps, but other “others,” until this past year, were not illustrated at all. Why they were not illustrated (though numbered) prior to […]

Question: what do railway tickets and stamps have in common? Answer: not much, unless they come in stationary made exclusively for the tickets. Which is what is shown, amongst all the tickets of course, in the “Korean Railroad Commemorative Ticket Traffic Card Catalogue”, published on March 26 2013. 

One of the most detailed catalogs for Korean stamps (not including the Korean Empire), was published for the first time in September, 1959 by Commander L.L. Dilley , USN (Ret.). Commander Dilley, seen here in a photo from World War II, was in the Cryptanalysis Section of Fleet Radio Unit Pacific (FRUPAC) based in Hawaii, […]