On Dec 10, 2:04*pm, "Colin McKenzie" wrote:
On Tue, 06 Dec 2011 21:30:01 -0000, Sir Hystrix
wrote:

On 3/12/2011 20:32, Colin McKenzie wrote:
But how far back are they valid for postage? The Wikipedia article
"Postage stamp demonetization" seems to be accurate for the 4 countries
it covers [HK (1997), USA (1861), UK (1971), Poland (1998 or later)] but
what about the rest? Is there a more complete source of this
information?

How many countries can we work out between us?

In Belgium it is difficult to draw a line. Basically a stamp is valid
for postage unless it is explicitly mentioned that is not valid. You
would have to buy a Belgian stamp catalog to know. All stamps issued
after 2 October 1961 are valid, but many stamps issued before this date
are also still valid.

Thanks for all the replies. It really seems to be a matter of local
knowledge - I would never have guessed that pre-Euro stamps are still
valid in the Eurozone.

Only in part of the Eurozone. We had a thread that discussed this back
in 2004.
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.c...9?dmode=source

Belgium, France, and the Netherlands continue to allow use of their
pre-euro stamps. Finland also allows use of pre-euro stamps, but only
for less than two weeks from now -- the mark-denominated stamps are
scheduled to be demonetized at the end of 2011. Austria, Germany,
Greece, Ireland, Luxembourg, Portugal, and Spain don't allow use of
pre-euro stamps.

I don't have information about Italy, nor about Cyprus, Estonia,
Malta, Slovakia, and Slovenia, which joined the Eurozone after that
discussion.

--
Joshua Kreitzer