"First Day" signed envelope, from Itzhak bar-Ziv's collection. Photo credit: Avital Pilpel.
The above envelope is a "first day" envelope issued by the Israeli Postage Service to commemorate the 16th chess olympiad, on Nov. 2nd, 1964, with the Olympiad's cancellation mark and one of the two stamps printed by the IPS to mark the occassion. Prices have changed, by the way: the stamp is for 0.12 Israeli pounds, which today would be 0.000012 new Israeli shekels, or about 0.000003 US dollars...
On the front, the signatures of: Tigran Petrosian, Mikhail Botvinnik, Vassily Smyslov, Efim Geller, Paul Keres (all USSR), Miguel Najdorf, Shlomo (Samuel) Shweber (signed in Hebrew; both Argentina), Isaac Kashdan, Samuel Herman Reshevsky (USA), Hoshang Mashian (Iran -- he signed in Hebrew(!)), Klaus Darga (West Germany), Kenneth Kirby (South Africa), Bruno Parma (Yugoslavia), and Zvonko Vransic (Canada).
On the back: Rene Letelier (Chile), "Garcia" (either Gilberto Garcia of Cuba or Raimundo Garcia of Argentina -- probably the latter, since both Najdorf and Schweber, his teammates, signed), Smyslov and Geller (again), Milan Matulovic and Mijo Udovcic (Yugoslavia), Bent Kolvig and Borge Andersen (Denmark), Franciscus Kuijpers and Christian Langeweg (Netherlands), Erling Kristiansen (Norway), Silvain Zinser (France), Trausti Bjornsson (Iceland), Miroslav Filip (Czechoslovakia), Gideon Stahlberg (Sweden), Wolfgang Unzicker (West Germany), the captain of the Swiss team (presumably not a player, as the signature doesn't fit any of them -- does anybody know who he was?), Nevzat Suer and another unidentified player (Turkey).
P.S.
Thanks very much to www.olimpbase.org for much of this data (e.g., precise English spelling, teams, and so on.) Some of the players who signed (e.g., Geller and Najdorf) do not appear in olimpbase's web site for the 1964 olympiad since they were formally non-playing team captains.
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