World's Greatest Postage Stamp Engraver
Signs Autographs at Stamp Show Stampede

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His work is in the Guinness Book of Records and he was at the Tucson Convention Center to sign autographs the weekend of January 19 to 21 when the NORDIA 2001 Stamp Show Stampede opened its doors with admission free to the public.

Czeslaw Slania, the most well known stamp engraver in the world and the engraver of the U.S. postage stamp honoring Grace Kelly, will be on hand courtesy of Sweden Post. He has created more than 500 stamps for Sweden alone and has also engraved stamps and bank notes for many other countries including two new stamps released by the Marshall Islands Friday, January 19, at this stamp show in Tucson.

His 1,000th stamp, released in Stockholm last March, reproduces a ceiling painting from the royal family's Drottningholm castle in Stockholm by the 17th century painter David Klöcker Ehrenstrahl. That stamp is in the Guinness Book of Records as the world's largest engraved postage stamp. It too was shown and was made available for collectors at the exhibition. Also available were two stamps engraved by Slania for the Marshall Islands and printed by Sweden Post. They had their first day of issue at the show and are now available from Unicover, the Marshall Islands agent in the United States. Click on http://www.unicover.com/.

Mr. Slania joined the Sweden Post as a full time engraver in 1960. Since then, he has been appointed Royal Court Engraver in Sweden, Denmark and Monaco He has won numerous awards for the beauty, speed and proliferation of his engravings. His outlook is international as he has done engravings not only for Sweden and the U.S. but also for Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Denmark, England, Estonia, Faroes, France, Germany, Gibralter, Greenland, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Jamaica, Kazakhistan, Latvia, Lithuania, New Zealand, San Marino, the United Nations and his native Poland. He was born in Silesia, Poland in 1921 and entered the Cracow School of Fine Arts in 1945. Employed by the Polish Government Printing Works, Slania engraved his first stamp for Poland in 1951.

So respected is his stamp work, there are four specialist societies organized by stamp collectors to collect his stamps from all over the world that he has designed. They have headquarters in Sweden, Denmark, Poland and the United States. The U.S. society met at NORDIA 2001.

Gordon C. Morison
President, NORDIA 2001, INC.
P.O. Box 59305
Potomac, MD 20859 USA

Tel: +1 301-299-7103
Fax: +1 301-299-0751
e-mail: morisong@worldnet.att.net

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2000.12.25 - DuBois / Nørby