Folded Business Cards Used in Brazil on the 1930 Pan Am Flight of the Zeppelin

Recently an article appeared concerning an unusual type of business postal card Folded Business Card – FBC)that appeared in the 20's of the previous century and enjoyed enormous use in the decades thereafter /1/. Shortly there the first article a further appeared demonstrating the use of a FBC on several flights of the Graf Zeppelin /2/. These were usually sent from Europe and the question was if there were further examples.

I can here report that a whole batch of cards (Fig.1) was sent on the 1930 Pan Am Zeppelin flight franked with the typical mixed official/semi-official franking for this particular case. Interesting, since a 300 Reis stamp paid the surface postcard rate for cards to Europe, the letter rate would have been 500 Reis. Accordingly the Condor/Zeppelin stamp of 5$000 was the final effective rate for postcards /3/. Fig.1 demonstrates the front of such a typical card, of which at least about a dozen are known of. The Condor postmark of the Saõ Francisco do Sul agency. It fact, quite a good amount of the mail from this agency on this particular flight is the Frischer cards. Of the 8 covers from this agency in my collection, 5 are “Frischer”, 4 to Austria (Fuchshuber) and a fifth using a 5$000 overprinted USA to the US (Barthel). The other three are private postcards to Germany.

Figure 1: Front view of the Frischer FBC

Fig.2, the backside of the card, shows the typical large Recife back stamp and the lack of a message, a purely philatelic creation.

Figure 2: Reverse Side of Card

Equally interesting is the fact that although the dealer was an Austrian, his cards were printed in Berlin, Germany as Fig. demonstrates.

Figure 3: Magnification of the inscription on the front of the card

In conclusion, this seems to be the only case of this type of stationary used in Brazil on this flight.

References:

/1/ Robert M. Bell and Ian McQueen: Economical folded Business Postcards; The German Postal Specialist 56(#3), 105 (March 2005)

/2/ Jim Graue: EFBC by Zeppelin; The German Postal Specialist 56(#11), 460 (November 2005)

/3/ Artur Knoth: Condor do Brasil Zeppelin Covers on the 1^st Pan Am Zeppelin Flight of 1930 - “The Rate Samba”; Fakes Forgeries Experts #8, 121 (May 2005)