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Post, as in "post office," comes from the Latin "Positiones," the inns where men and horses were housed at the end of a day's journey in ancient Rome. Today, restaurants that provide refreshments during or after a journey are named Post Houses.

A yachtsman recently visited the Tuvalu Islands in the South Pacific. The manager of the stamp bureau on the island reported that the boat owner did not have a map of the islands, but was able to navigate through the shallows using a Tuvalu postage stamp that pictured the islands in detail.

The article didn't say if the boat owner was able to get away from the rocks surrounding the island without another stamp.

A condominium state is one ruled by two or more countries, with each country having its own post office and stamps. This has no relation to a condo apartment, but may turn out to be a practical solution to the problems of the Middle East.

Israel and Jordan are quietly working together in the West Bank, and the two countries have recently established an Arab bank in Nablus to finance development projects in the area. The next step could be post offices and the issuance of postage stamps for the territory of the West Bank. The separate stamps could be in Hebrew and Arabic.

This move has precedence in the country of Andorra. In the 9th Century, Emperor Charles II named a Spanish bishop overlord of Andorra. The French protested. In 1278, an agreement was reached that provided for joint political control.

The country pays a nominal financial tribute to both France and Spain and the monetary units are in pesetas and francs. The Spanish Andorra stamps read "Correos". The French stamps read "Postes."

In 1983, there was a lot of publicity about the Hitler diaries and how they turned out to be fake. A book, "Selling Hitler," tells the story of the gigantic swindle, both on the part of the forger and the journalist who sold it to a German magazine for more than $1 million.

In the introduction to the book, the author, Robert Harris, mentions that a collection of stamps formed by Hitler entitled "Enemy Propaganda in Stamps" survived the war and was confiscated by the United States Counter Intelligence Corps. This is the first time that anyone has ever described the Fuhrer as a stamp collector.

All efforts to trace the current status of Hitler's stamp collection have turned up blank.

Taiwan is well-known for manufacturing products at low prices. The same thing seems to be true with their post office. The domestic postage rates for mail with the country has been the same for 12 years -- the equivalent of ten U.S. cents. In addition, every home and business gets two mail deliveries a day, seven days a week. Mail is picked up from boxes four times each day.

The 12,324 post offices are open seven days a week; customers can make savings account deposits or withdrawals at many of these offices. To give you an idea as to how important this is, the Savings Department has the equivalent of $22 billion U.S. dollars on deposit. The Taiwan post office also sells life insurance.

King George V of England was an avid stamp collector and owned more than 300 stamp albums. The story is told that his wife, the Queen, read an article out loud from a London paper about someone who paid the equivalent of $12,000 for a postage stamp and remarked that there certainly were idiots in this world.

The King is said to have replied, "I was that idiot." But, even the King of England could not get all the stamps he wanted. In 1922, the rarest stamp in the world, the 1856 British Guiana, was put up for auction. The King's bid of $27,500 was too low. This was the only major rarity missing from his collection of British Empire issues. Incidentally, the stamp sold for $935,000 several years ago in another auction.

After the King died in 1936, the contents of his collection were valued at approximately $2.5 million. The collection is still in the hands of the monarchy and is now called the "Royal Collection."

The famous film "Lawrence of Arabia," starring Peter O'Toole, portrayed the life of Thomas Edward Lawrence a soldier and a hero. He also was a stamp collector and stamp designer.

Lawrence went on a tour of Syria in 1911 and Arabia. Today, this area is part of Saudi Arabia and contains the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.

The Grand Sherif of Mecca, declared Hejaz independent Turkish rule, and in February 1916, the stamps designed by T.E. Lawrence were put into use by the new country.

The mail that Lawrence sent to his friends with the stamps were recently sold at an auction in London. The star item of the collection is an envelope, addressed to Lawrence's friend, Captain Ormsby-Gore of the Cairo Arab Bureau franked with the first issue of Hejaz. The identity of the sender is shown by the signature of T. E. Lawrence on the bottom of envelope.

The auction sale brought more than $200,000. It acknowledged that the mystique of Lawrence of Arabia helped boost prices.

The first British stamp showing King George V, issued for the 1924 British Empire Exhibition, caused a public uproar because people thought the British lion pictured on the stamp looked too thin. The stamp was redrawn and reissued in 1925.

Besides the famous city of Chicago located in Illinois, there is only one other town with that name in the whole world. Chicago also exists in the Central American nation of Belize. This nation was formerly called British Honduras.

Unfortunately, the town is so small that it does not have a post office. Outgoing mail is serviced by Maskall or Sand Hill, depending on whether the letter carrier is heading North or South after leaving Chicago.