Zeppelin mail - General

Philatelic zeppelin mail. This cover can be identified as philatelic mail because of the receiver address. Friedrich Wilhelm von Meister was vice president of the  "American Zeppelin Transport Corporation" and many zeppelin mail items were sent to his New York address. Another clear sign for a philatelic cover: The cover is stll closed and empty; it never contained a letter.

Postal items carried by Zeppelin airships are called "Zeppelin mail". They can be categorized into philatelic mail that was only mailed for collection purposes and postal mail that carried real information. Philatelic mail usually only consists of a postcard or empty cover carrying only the address of the receiver, while "real" postal mail usually carries some sort of information. 

However, as sometimes the only carried information is the request to handle the card with care and to send it back to the sender (for his own collection), there is a rather smooth transition between the definition of philatelic and "real" mail. It certainly depends on the personal interest if one considers one of the two categories more relevant than the other. But in any case, zeppelin mail is always a fascinating contemporary witness.

The web portal ezep.de is an excellent source of inormation for anything related to zeppelin mail, while zeppelinpost.ch is mostly devoted to Swiss zeppelin mail.