From our archive: The reason for the issuance of the first children's stamp sheet and the six differences.

This year marks 60 years since the first children's stamp sheet appeared. However, children's stamps have existed for well over a hundred years. Why did a sheet appear alongside the series for the first time in 1965? In 1949, when the 'By the Child – For the Child' school campaign was introduced nationwide, schoolchildren sold not only picture postcards but also children's stamps after taking orders. The stamps, all taken from sheets of one hundred, were torn from the sheets by hand and placed in a small bag. The actions involved bordered on the unbelievable. The girls' boarding school 'Huize De Goede Herder' in Zoeterwoude filled transparent and printed glassine bags with children's stamps up to and including the Children's Stamp Year of 1964. For the 1963 Children's Stamp campaign, for example, over 25.000.000 stamps were torn into blocks of four and six. These blocks were subsequently placed into 2.125.000 bags using a rebus card. Finally, all these bags were checked for their correct contents and bundled in sets of 10 or 25. After this, the bundles were assembled into units of 100 or 250 and later prepared for shipment in boxes of 2000. These time-consuming operations could effectively no longer be completed within a short timeframe. The solution to the problem became the children's stamp sheet. The many manual steps were now efficiently reduced to just a few. In 1965, the first sheet containing 12 perforated stamps was still manually folded by 'Huize De Goede Herder' and placed in transparent bags along with a rebus card. In 1966, the first machine filling of envelopes took place. After a number of years of children's stamps, the size and volume of the sheet became smaller. Efficiency proved to be the key word at the time for the school campaign, now known by the motto 'For children by children'. PostNL has also been applying this functional efficiency of the stamp sheet to stamp sales for years, as the sale of individual stamps that have to be torn from sheets is a time-consuming affair. For children's stamps, the sheet has for years been a supplement to the series of 'single' stamps, which were always still printed in sheets of 100. However, since 2002, only sheets of children's stamps have been issued. Until the appearance of the aforementioned sheet, all stamps were issued in sheets of at least 25, though usually 100, containing the same stamps. There is one exception, and that is the Legion blocks shown below. During the German occupation, the first two stamp blocks appeared in our country in 1942 under the influence of the propagandistic example of the German National Socialists (NVPH stamp sheets 402b and 403b). The stamps depict a grim-looking soldier from the pro-German Dutch Legion. There are six variants of the first children's block from 1965 that are not (yet) listed separately in the NVPH catalog. Each has a different characteristic on the edges that reveals its position on the uncut printing sheet. With a black crosshair on the left side With a black line at the top With a black crosshair on the right side. With a black, yellow, and blue line on the right side. With a red line at the top right. Or with completely blank edges. Do you already have all six in your Netherlands collection? ———- *The original article is by Bate Hylkema from 2006, edited by Rob Smit in 2025. Read this article for an explanation of archival stories.