Coalmining stickers are primarily issued by Coal Companies to promote different occasions within their mines.

Derek Adams says,

" What I like about some of the stickers is the history associated with them, some are made to celebrate mine openings, anniversaries, milestones, closures, special editions, mines rescue competitions and safety achievements so if you are a mining historian you could use the various information contained on the stickers to help with research".

JOY Manufacturing Company

JOY Manufacturing Company started out in Bluefield, West Virginia. In the early 1950's a little company called Hart Electric which did coil rewinding for other small businesses. (Their symbol was a heart w/a streak of lightening going through the heart). Hart Electric sold to JOY Manufacturing Company. This is where JOY all started and then spread throughout the United States and later on to Australia, South Africa, UK and numerous other countries.

This sticker picture is a type of puzzle where when you get all 21 of the stickers it reads JOY Parts and Service which was put out by the Australian JOY company for the '92 Las Vegas Show.

This particular set comes in 5 different backgrounds which are reflective, diamond, coarse glitter, prismatic and fine sand glitter. All up if you have all 5 sets it totals 108 individual stickers as explained below.

When you have all 21 (which is a set) of the orange, white, and black you put them together in a line, in yellow you will see JOY Parts and Service. On the last sticker--where there is part of an E on it--you will see SERVICE EXELLENCE which is wrong--it should have been EXCELLENCE. They corrected that by coming out with another sticker that was spelled correctly. The correct spelling of this sticker is the hardest one to get. Now, this makes this particular set of 21 go to a set of 22. This error happened on the reflective, the glitter, and the prismatic. The 4th set in diamond print the last sticker SERVICE EXCELLENCE was spelled correctly. They did not have to make a change on this one. In other words there are only 21 to this set where there are 22 to the previous 3 sets. The 5th set that was put out in real fine sand glitter where the last sticker ends with SERVICE EXCELLENCE. This set corrected the 1st coarse glitter set. When comparing both glitter sets there is a huge difference. These sets are scarce because when the Joy representatives came to hand them out they only gave the prismatic(plain) set to the Coalminers, you know the guys who do the physical kind of work that only a coal miner does and then gave the other 4 sets to selective management personnel, this was pretty wide spread in the industry not only for Joy but a lot of coal companys.

At the time of writing Mr Larry Click (US) has accumulated 1766 Joy stickers which is 99.9% of all Joy stickers, then Mr Gary Thomas (US) has 1644, Mrs Carol Ginnetti(US) has 1403, Mr Barry Fleming(Aus) has 1309 and Mr Derek Adams has 1008.