COVER N. 640 - FRANCE

Postmark: Service des Oblitérations Philatéliques 24 - Boulazac  06.10.2025 

Posted on the 6th October; Received on the 9th October 2025

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Quite an uncommon addition to the collection, this nice cover from France, with an oval stamp. Un grand Merci, Roland. 

It is well know that there are things that we take for granted, and never ever give a thought as to their origin... they seem to have been there for ever and we just can't imagine our days, our lives, without them.

And yet , some of them are not that old. Take the Tetra Pak brik carton, for instance....If I strain my neurons a bit I can evoke the days when milk was sold in glass jars, sealed plastic bags, or even before that,  the days when the milkman would come by our house daily to supply us with freshly milked milk, which, when heated, would produce on its surface a delicious skin of cream that I would grasp with a spoon to lay on a dish and mix with some sugar.... hmmmm yummy.....

Many other artefacts that make our live much easier are much older than the Tetra brik, so much so that one would think that some of them would already have been named in the Book of Genesis, for hard as we try we can't recollect leaving without them.

The humble pencil is one such item. 

The practical and useful combination of a wooden stick with a graphite core was one of the first artefacts that I as so many children were presented with during their first formative years, just as we started to be able to coordinate our gestures and movements. 

Those first pencil scribbles, made it easier to later learn how to draw letters and numbers and gain access to the wonderful world of written expression. 

The origin of the pencil can be traced back to the days when coal would be used to leave a mark on a surface.... and ever since then, nothing has really changed in its purpose, although its form has significantly changed.

In fact, from the first sticks of coal and jet, to the later lead stylus, used by the Romans, the most common writing implement before the BIC ballpoint would evolve to the shape and composition we all know in the final years of the 18th century, as the brainchild of French army officer, painter, balloonist, and inventor Nicolas-Jacques Conté (1755 - 1805).

Story has it that when Napoleon's France was under an economic blockade that made it impossible to import  graphite sticks from the UK, Conté had the idea of mixing graphite powder with clay and encasing a core of the mix in cylinders of wood. The modern pencil was thus born and such was its success that Conté would create a company that bore his name - Societé Comté -  and which subsists to this day, dedicated to its production. 

220 years past his passing (or 270, past his birth) La Poste honoured Nicolas-Jacques Conté with the 2,10 €  stamp on the cover, issued on 28JUL2025.

The oval stamp, which is nested on the 15 stamp sheets on which the issue was printed as a traditional rectangular stamp, so that you can separate the stamp from the sheet as an oval or a rectangle, is illustrated with an engraving of  Monsieur Conté wearing an eye band over his left blind eye, a result of an accident with hydrogen during his aerostat development investigations.

The very neat postmark was applied by the Philatelic Obliterations Service, at  Boulazac.