Monthly Archives: September 2019

One of the areas in which United States philately differs from nearly all the rest of the world is in our Official Stamps. As an agency of the federal government (one of the powers our Constitution expressly designated as a federal power was control of the national post office) the US post Office always carried official mail for free. Congressmen and Senators had the Free frank and differing government agencies sent their mail for free often under the "penalty envelope" system which were preprinted to discourage private use by government workers. In 1873 the Post Office issued a series of stamps for the various government agencies that used stamps. A distinctive set was issued for each department that would use them and also to collectors who wished to purchase them. There are over 125 varieties of these issues of 1873 recognized as major numbers by the Scott catalog and nearly all of them are scarce. It is important to remember how unusual Official stamps are in the world of philately.

Turkey today is a country with only moderate influence in areas that most often make headlines in American newspapers. But until World War I, Turkey was an important, often the important player in the European theater. Turkey, through Byzantium, later named Constantinople, was the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, and though Rome itself was sacked in the fifth century and the western Roman Empire formally ended at that time, the empire in the east continued until the Turkish conquest of Constantinople in the fifteenth century. The Ottomans continued to dominate the politics of Eastern and Southern Europe and nowhere was this more evident than in the Balkan area. The Balkans are a mountainous area in southeastern Europe that have been at the fulcrum of much European turmoil. Because of its geographic location the Balkans have been the path from Asia to Europe and so have been a buffer for both Turks and Europeans wishing to secure their borders. Montenegro is a small and mountainous country

The issuance of postage stamps was one of the great technological and commercial innovations of the nineteenth century. Postage stamps allowed easy prepayment of postage and reduced postal labor costs enormously as each letters no longer needed to be weighed and paid for separately as it came in. But bureaucracies are slow to change and it was five full years after Great Britain issued the Penny Black that the first postal entity in the United States-the New York Post Office-issued the first United States Postage stamp in 1845. It is designated by Scott a Postmaster Provisional and it was for use only on letters going from New York. The design will seem familiar. It looks very similar to the design of the 10c general issue stamp (Scott #2) that was issued by the United States Post Office two years later. As with most classic philately, the fewer issues a particular area has to collect the more likely collectors are to find varieties worth collecting on the stamps at hand. There are numerous

The country that is today called Germany is a recent political construction. Indeed, even in the last twenty or so years the borders have been in flux with the reunification of the GDR into the Bundesrepublic. Much of the history of Europe over the last 300 years has been concerned with the drawing of Germanic borders and this is reflected in German philately of the nineteenth century. Germany was not one nation in the early philatelic period, rather a group of autonomous states each with its own ruling families and which were often antagonistic towards each other. Seventeen independent German nations issued stamps which are today listed in the Scott catalog under the heading German States. Perhaps the most popular stamp of all the hundreds of the German States issues is the first stamp of Bavaria issued in 1849. It is one of the scarcer stamps of the world and as with most German States has been forged often (in the case of Bavaria #1 there are over twenty different forgeries). The reason

There are areas of specialization that are unique to each country or areas of philately. United States collectors are avid about plate blocks and stamp collectors in the rest of the world think we are crazy. Israel collectors esteem tabs. British Commonwealth collectors collect gutter pairs and marginal markings. And German area collectors collect Zusammendrucke. Stamps that go into stamp booklets are printed in panes (usually of six) and those panes are printed in sheets of various sizes. The United States post office does not issue these large uncut sheets to collectors so that all US philatelists can collect is booklet panes and booklets. German philatelists have additional options as the German post office sells full booklet sheets to philatelists. These are uncut sheets, often with 100-220 subjects on the sheet. German collectors collect them in full sheets, as panes and in combinations that never would be issued to the public but which are possible from breaking up the sheets. Zusammendrucke

The great scramble for Africa in the late nineteenth century found the major European powers dividing up the continent into colonies for economic development. The Germans got into the game a bit later than Britain and for the most part their ventures in Africa were more for the political heft that it gave them than any economic gain. Actually, there were two extremely profitable Colonies-India, run by the British, and the Netherlands Indies (now Indonesia) run by the Dutch-but for the most part the colonies in Africa, no matter who the colonial administrator, were more problematic than profitable (Leopold's brutal slave state in the Congo was the exception). The reason was that low population density, difficulties of transportation, and, once you got past the coast, disease made the interior largely uninhabitable for Europeans who had no natural immunity to any African diseases.

 None of this

There is no more appropriate stamp design than the portrait of Hermes, the messenger god in his winged helmet, on the first stamps of Greece. Hermes, son of Zeus, was also the god of commerce so it is not only as a messenger that he is pictured on the first stamp but as the facilitator of commerce which was the major economic benefit of the first postal issues. The Hermes Heads stamps of Greece are among the most difficult in philately to identify, not because the stamps are any more intrinsically difficult than any others, but because the catalog listings are overly complex and specialized to an almost absurd degree.

 The Scott catalog, following the Greek catalogs, make 58 major numbers and hundreds of minor ones out of the same stamp design. These stamps were printed from the same plates and the distinguishing characteristics are often such qualities as where the stamps were printed (Paris

The stamps of the British Commonwealth had a tradition of portraying only the ruling monarch. This tradition continued right up through the early Queen Elizabeth era and now most British Commonwealth stamps have the Queen's portrait along with some commemorative design. In the 171 years of philatelic issues there have only been five monarchs on British Commonwealth stamps. After 61 years of philatelic fame Queen Victoria was replaced on the throne by her son King Edward VIII. This was the first royal transition in philately and there was no tradition over how it would be handled. Would the current issues continue to be on sale until the supplies were exhausted? Would the Victoria issues be reprinted until there was a call for new rates and new issues? The decision that was made that the older monarch's stamps would be replaced as soon as was expedient with new stamps picturing the current reigning monarch.