It is really hard to give most general collectors a picture of just how rare most foreign revenue stamps issued before 1945 really are. Let me put it this way. In terms of volume of stamps, we sell hundreds of millions of individual stamps per year. And of that hundreds of millions perhaps only a few thousand are Foreign pre 1940 Revenues. And here is a little group- Italian Colony Revenues-containing stamps that we have never before offered. Italy was late to the colony game. The world's first great colonial power, Spain, was already weary of the exercise and retained only a fraction of its original colonial hoard before Italy was an active colonizer. And Italy largely played around the edges, administering larger cities and coastal areas of places like Libya and Ethiopia, unlike the British and French who vied to occupy entire continents. Even the regular postage stamps of the Italian Colonies are hard to find. Pictured above are a small group of late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century Libya and Eritrean revenue stamps that were used to pay various taxes. If I were collecting on a rarity to dollar ratio I would concentrate on foreign revenues.
