Sometimes a simple used stamp can raise a lot of questions.
The stamp in question is actually a souvenir sheet: Scott 5879,
issued for the Stamp World London exhibition in 1990. It’s obviously
cancelled-to-order (CTO), with the impossibly crisp postmark reading simply
MOSKVA – POCHTAMT that is never seen on any normal piece of mail and probably
isn’t a real postmark to begin with.
CTO stamps have been around for over a century, and for
almost a century in Russia, with CTO stamps making an appearance in the early
1920s. Originally, existing postmarks were used to cancel stamps in sheets, but
around 1930 we see special postmarks pressed into service, often (but not
always) inscribed “D.K.” which is presumed to stand for “For collectors”.
However, these are cancelling devices applied to sheets of the same stamps that
were available in post office. In other words, they were valid postage stamps,
cancelled to order after their printing was finished.
The souvenir sheet shown here betrays a quite different process.
It’s a funny feature of printing processes that silver and gold inks have to be
printed last, and this sheet has both silver and gold design elements. A quick look through a magnifying glass shows that these silver and gold
elements are on top of the
MOSKVA-POCHTAMT postmark. In other words, the “postmark” was printed onto
the stamps before the stamps were even finished.
So what are these things? They’re not postage stamps that
have been cancelled to order. They’re a kind of stamp facsimile, except instead
of the word “facsimile” to distinguish them from real stamps they have this
bogus “postmark”.
A case could be made that “CTO stamps” produced in this fashion
are not postage stamps at all and should not be listed in self-respecting stamp
catalogs.
You may think this is a subtle distinction, but mint sheets that are postmarked after their printing is finished were, at least for a brief time, valid postage stamps. These modern CTO things were never valid stamps.
