Postal Stationery – Czech and Slovak Republic

"Picture postcard with printed stamp" - used for short messages

Next to stamps with bicycles, many of us also collect so-called postal stationeries with images from or with a relation to bicycles. A postal stationary is a letter or postcard that is already franked when bought, and where the glued stamp is replaced by an imprinted stamp, text or image that represents the franking.
Stamps are not very easy to counterfeit but a "special" postal stationery is made in a minute. One can just put a postmark or scan of a nice two-wheeler on a card and it is a special item. With the rise of internet it has fortunately become much easier to investigate the authenticity of items. Many post organizations offer overviews of postal stationeries. So it is possible to check whether it is an official issue or not. 

Postal cards from the Czech and Slovak Republics exist in different categories:

Official issues 

                    Official issue for general use.

      Official issue with imprint on the left side

Semi-official issues
Various post organizations have next to their post delivery service, set up separate affiliated businesses, which for instance organize their representation on fairs, issuing FDC's, collectors or info cards from stamps issues, and sell other philatelic material (stock albums, tweezers, year albums). In the Czech Republic this company is called PostFila and it issues to almost every fair in withch they participate a special postal card.

On these cards we find the PostFila logo.  

Further semi-officials are issued by post related philatelic museums:
       
These issues carry the logo of the post museum  .

In the online catalog of this website you find the semi-officials in the category “stationeries, personalized“.

Private issues:

Associations, clubs and publishers promptly use this possibility to generate profit. In the Czech Republic there are, next to a lot of small "printers", a few big players in this market. Famous are Bimba.cz and Press-Fil, which is part of catalogue maker Phila-News. These postal cards are private makes, although the images can be very nice. The mentioned Press-Fil issues many postal cards per year - and fairly prints its own logo on its products.

Sellers on the internet praise them as follows:

       

Don’t believe everything you read. It is worth to well evaluate these issues before buying and using them in your collection. If you have the possibility, check on the official sites of the postal services whether it is an official postal stationery or not.

In the online catalog of this website you find them in the category “stationeries, private“.

Update:

Since the end of 2017/beginning of 2018 Czech postal stationeries such as these are appearing increasingly on the auction platform delcampe:

This postal card - worth collecting because of the postmark - is defaced by a private added printing. The picture shows the "Altar" with Olympic fire in front of the Berlin City-Palace on the occasion of the Olympic Games 1936 in Berlin:

This photo is available for free use on Wikipedia. It has no direct relation to the honored cyclist Miloslav Loos. Only the text "Miloslav Loos, 20.1.1914 - 2.3.2010" has been added. The remnants of a first attempt show how dilletantically this was done:

Presumably it is a private person who tries to compete with the companies Bimba.cz and Press-Fil. The added printing does not create a collectible bicycle-stationery. Therefore these cards are classified in the online catalog of this website as cinderella.

It now depends on your purchase decision whether we will see more of these creations in the future or not.

Most parts of this article come from the article written by Hans de Kloet

Further references: Vojtech Jankovic BS42_16

                                   Czech Post: Prepaid stationeries

Published in January 2017.