Who is fooling whom

On August 28, 1979, two special stamps were issued: one commemorating 100 years of football and one marking 60 years of women's suffrage in the Netherlands. The latter stamp, unlike the first, caused quite a stir! What was the case? It turned out that the 55-cent stamp in the sheet of 100 had a top margin on which part of the stamp was printed with the word "Netherlands" and the value 55 cents. Immediately, there were clever people who thought: hey, that’s great, because the postal law states that a stamp must bear the country name and a value indication. So: those 10 pieces of sheet margin are stamps too! And sure enough, they were pasted here and there as stamps. Including in Hank, where the manager of the post office had a letter placed on his counter requesting him to properly cancel the 'stamp' and send the letter. This happened on the first day of the 'stamp's' validity, and because the manager had no instructions on what to do, he complied with the request. Apparently, he did not realize at the time that he was being fooled. As a result, quite a few letters were sent and promptly charged for postage because, in the eyes of the State Postal and Telecommunications Company, they were not franked or insufficiently franked. A major disagreement arose, and the disputes flared up to such an extent that a court ruling was even issued regarding the matter. The judge ruled that the sheet margin containing 10 impressions of a part of the stamp were not valid stamps for postage. The explanation was very simple: the PTT had announced the release of the stamps in the Government Gazette, stating that they were sheets of 10 x 10 = 100 stamps, and therefore not sheets of 110. An image of the complete stamp was also included, so that was the only real one! Too bad for those people who thought they could fool the PTT with a stamp sheet margin. The 'victims' took it sportingly, and so a disagreement was transformed into a nice collector's item. And so Alleta Jacobs, thanks to designer Addy de Meester, often appeared in the public eye, but in a way she herself would never have conceived or fought for.