Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya

Customs Declarations, 1996-1997

Entirely outside of my collecting focus, but I discovered a large cache of these for sale and was compelled to acquire a small representative selection. Enormously charming items — lurid, collector-targeted stamps and minisheets compelled to do prosaic postal duty. My copy of Scott (2004) doesn’t list any Libyan stamps beyond October 1992 — whether they drew the line there in protest at the insincerity of subsequent issues, or they simply lacked the data to continue their listing, I don’t know. At any rate, these stamps were evidently available for everyday use, whether or not that was the principal intention behind their issue.

We have consistently large frankings here — I’m ignorant as to whether this reflects the stamps falling behind inflation, high export duties, or something else. The third forms down, where someone was trying to export a “baby”, is bemusing. A couple of the forms use the older style “Libyan Arab Republic”, while the others use the contemporary “Jamahiriya” name.

28 March 1996

10 April 1996

20 June 1996

22 July 1996

1 January 1997

17 September 2020