Every collector gets great satisfaction when he discovers an item missing from his collection, and when he can acquire it it gives him great joy. In my case this relates equally to the stamps and the ads in our collection.

In collecting stamps designed by Shamir I did not need to go through the discovering or buying steps. My father, Gabriel Shamir, left in his estate a legacy of stamp albums with about 700 stamps. He believed that this was the complete set of all Shamir designed stamps and that he had in his hands the same collection as his brother Maxim.

I transferred my father's stamp collection to the Postal Museum in the Eretz Israel Museum. At my suggestion Shenkar Institute scanned these stamps and placed them in its digital archive. I worked for half a year to find detailed information on these stamps with the help of Lillach Gilboa who was responsible for the Philatelist Association's library.

In summer 2008 my cousin Gideon Shamir told me that he had a number of items of Shamir Brothers work that might interest me. I travelled to Yuvalim (where Gideon lives) to see what he had. Initially he showed me some gems: a number of original sketches of stamps. He then showed me his albums of stamps designed by Shamir, including from the period when his father worked alone, after the brothers' partnership dissolved in1974. I realised that this collection consisted of a significantly larger number of stamps than my father's collection which now resides at the Post Office Museum.

I asked Shenkar to send Gideon a disk with the 700 stamps they scanned from my collection and asked Gideon to scan the stamps that were not included in Shenkar's archive. He bought a scanner but could not find time for this exercise. We then asked his brother, Uri Shamir, who possessed the same collection as Gideon, if he would take on the task. Uri completed it within four months. He sent me his scans of 1300 stamp items that I did not have before. were These passed to Shenkar with the objective that they add them to their digital archive.

The main source for information on Israeli stamp series – accessible in Israel – is the Israel Philatelic Service. They advertised the issuing of each stamp in press releases, posters, ads and finally catalogues. Abroad, you can find information in national or international catalogues. Some of these catalogues include the designers' names and some do not. From the catalogues that included information about the designers I've learned that there were some cases, although fairly rare, where individual stamps in a series were designed by different artists. This implied that great care is needed when trying to reliably identify who designed which stamp. Another issue I encountered is that there is no record in the official reference sources on the identity of the designers of FDCs (First Day Covers - envelopes).

Press ads for stamps and FDCs did not include designer information in the ads. The press releases, however, did include the names of the designers. I asked the Philatelic Service to locate their files of releases, but they failed. I studied the reports that appeared in the newspapers of each Shamir series. The language of the reports for each issue in various newspapers was identical. The reports were certainly based on the Philatelic Service's press release. This solves to great extent the identity of the designers of the FDC of Shamir Israeli stamps.

However, Uri Shamir assures me that every stamp in his collection was designed by Shamir. This is based on the fact that his father, Maxim, was not a stamp collector. The only stamps he had in his albums were by Shamir. Two or three printed sets of the stamps, souvenir sheets or any other related philatelic product were usually sent to the designer by the printer or issuer of the stamps as part of the deal. Maxim's two album sets (one now with Gideon and one with Uri) were built up using those items.

I have also made many exciting discoveries of series of ads during the search. Thus were revealed a series of ads "Don't despair - Smoke Knesset 6", the series for the “Orlogin” alarm clocks, the series for branches of Discount Bank and a Tel Aviv Municipality series. In the latter two series of ads, in the 60s, Shamir Brothers made an innovative use, in my opinion, of photographs. The photos did not appear in the ads in their rectangular format but were, instead, cut into different shapes that created the composition of the ad.

The print quality of what I got out of the Canon micro-printer I used was very poor. The culprit could be the poor quality of photo printing in the daily newspapers of the time, the poor quality of the microfilm on which they were stored or possibly the quality of printing of the micro-printer itself.

I contacted the CEO of “Dahaf”, the advertising agency that served both Discount Bank and the Municipality at the time, – I got no response. Dahaf's Haim Shkedi agreed to look into this following Reuven Cohen's intervention. A few days later he told me that he checked with some of Dahaf's veterans and was told that files of inactive customers were returned to the customers.

I turned to Ofer, CEO of Discount Bank and asked him to point me in the direction of whoever was in charge of their archives – I did not receive a reply.

I approached Tziona Raz, Director of the Tel Aviv Municipality Archive. She located several Dahaf files. In them I found various municipality ads which appeared in some journals with low circulation but not in the daily press.

Yoram Shamir  2008