Page 63 - BSAM 2016 Q4

promoting international friendship through bonsai
Bonsai & Stone News
From Bonsai to Stamps to Photo Albums; A lifetime of bonsai appreciation and international
friendships.
BCI member Emanuel Lukes from Czech Republic started his bonsai journey in 1966. He soon made contact with BCI’s rst magazine editors—Connie and Horace Hinds, when he started to look for informations about bonsai. “I had a warm relationship with Connie and Horace. ey help me so much to be a member of BCI,” says Emanuel. Along with his love of bonsai, Emanuel is an avid collector of stamps and other bonsai memorabilia and enjoys creating photo albums.
Now that he is 74 years old, he is celebrating “the Hobby of a lifetime,” as he puts it, with an Online Bonsai Philatelic Exhibit structured like a walk through the history of Bonsai in Czechoslovakia. is philatelic exhibit is the rst (and only one) in the world about bonsai and for him it is very personal statement. He anticipated that an exhibit of bonsai stamps would be very small because only four countries issued 18 stamps before 1986. To this date just 133 bonsai stamps from 19 countries have been o cially released. You can see all these stamps in Emanuel’s exhibit. His exhibit contains not only stamps, but also special cancellations, postal stationery, FDCs (First Day Covers) and letters. But that’s not all.
To commemorate his bonsai journey and the many bonsai friends he made by post, he also includes cor- respondence with bonsai clubs around the world. It is a rare and incomparable postal history. Dur- ing his searching for informations about bonsai he collected more than 50 books (largest collection in Czech Republic). ese books allowed him to catalog his stamps by Bonsai Styles and other themes. (see top right).
The exhibit is mainly chronological and corre- sponds to his growing knowledge on bonsai, from discovering bonsai in 1966, to exhibiting his bonsai in Czechoslovakia and nally in Japan.
Highlights of the exhibit include stamps with bon- sai issued in Japan in 1946 (oldest stamp in the world with bonsai); Japanese cancellation from bonsai
Top; Emanuel noted the frequency of Bonsai styles and types of trees depicted in stamps.
Bottom; The title page for the 80-page photo album book that chronicles bonsai and stamps over 50 years.
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