Page 63 - Tạp chí bonsai cây cảnh BCI 2017Q2

promoting
international friendship
Bonsai & Stone News
through bonsai

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 first magazine editors—Connie and
Horace Hinds, when he started to look for informations
about bonsai. “I had a warm relationship with Connie
and Horace. They 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. This
philatelic exhibit is the first (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 officially
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 Top; Emanuel noted the
bonsai friends he made by post, he also includes cor- frequency of Bonsai styles
respondence with bonsai clubs around the world. and types of trees depicted in
It is a rare and incomparable postal history. Dur- stamps.
ing his searching for informations about bonsai he Bottom; The title page for the
80-page photo album book
collected more than 50 books (largest collection in that chronicles bonsai and
Czech Republic). These books allowed him to catalog stamps over 50 years.
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 finally 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

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