Capex -Canadian International Philatelic Exhibition

I am trying to reorganise parts of my accumulation of stamps into a more logical format. To this end, I am mounting material onto white A4 card and placing the cards in protective plastic wallets in a ring binder. It is probably not the best way to mount material but it works reasonably well.

Circa 1997, there was a car boot sale in a local park. I went grudgingly but I did find a stall where someone was selling off some covers. I managed to buy the bulk of the Canadian material for about £20 which was all that I had on me. I had examples of the majority of the covers but what made them interesting was that they had postmarks other than the Canadian Philatelic Bureau one.

Amongst the covers was the cover illustrated below. It has the CAPEX sheet issued by the USPS. It is on what appears to be an envelope from the organisers. On the left of the envelope are printed three Victorian stamps and a maple twig similar in design to that shown on the sheet.

 

The stamps illustrate eight examples of North American wildlife including the blue jay, chipmunk and raccoon. The cancel is of CAPEX Station, United States Postal Service, Toronto and is dated 15 June 1978.

Note that Mr Zip, the postman, appears on the selvage. Mr Zip was introduced to help promote the use of the American version of the post code - the zipcode. The zip code initially had five digits but was later extended to zip+4 to improve the flexibility of the system and extend its usefulness in getting mail to more local areas.