Echos in the past

Does anyone remember the Spitak earthquake? This terrible earthquake in 1988 pretty much destroyed the Armenian town of Spitak and caused terrible damage in Leninakan/Gyumri and Kirovakan/Vanadzor. An international aid campaign came into being quickly, but the whole aftermath became entangled first in the Armenian independence movement, then in the break-up of the USSR and the Armenian-Azeri war. All we're left with is a memory of an earthquake that killed tens of thousands of people.

Sometimes you find out things by accident. Take a look at this card:

1929 stationery card from Tiflis to Sweden

I like the stationery cards of the Second Standard issue (a.k.a. the Big Heads), but they're hardly rare. Still, the Georgian cards are not that easy to find, and this one is nice and clean. But on the reverse...

Nice trilingual charity label! And read the message... An echo of 1988, 59 years in the past.

Those awkward covers!

When you collect postal history you occasionally run into a problem that I call the Too Much Happiness problem: you find a cover that fits into multiple categories that you collect. It makes for awkward decisions, as you're unlikely to find a similar cover.

As an example, here's one cover that caused me some headaches:

Bilingual postmark, I collect those. Nice single franking of USSR stamp, I collect those. Registration label with ASSR name manually added, I certainly collect those. Improvised "Express" label, how could anyone not collect those?
Crap. I have to find about 3 more covers exactly like this one...

What is rare?

As you gradually grow older and rack up more years of experience you do get a more informed view of which things are rare. You notice that some things pop up with some regularity and other things don't.

As a collector of Siberian Civil War stamps and postal history there are a few prime candidates for rarity. I'll disregard the Nikolaevsk-on-Amur garbage, but for example, the Merkulov Anniversary issue of 1922 is hard to find. About 2000 sets were overprinted and it can take a few years before you're lucky enough to find a set. Of course, these days the internet improves your chances of success dramatically!

Mint, these stamps are hard to find. Postally used, these stamps are downright rare.Disregard the philatelic postmark of Vladivostok "g" and you really have to get lucky to find used stamps of this set.

These stamps on cover? Yikes! I've seen about half a dozen covers over the years. Most of these were philatelically-inspired. Good luck!

The low print run is somewhat deceptive in this case. Sure, only 2000 sets were issued but these all seem to have ended up with a small number of stamp dealers and collectors, ensuring a high survival rate over the years.

Other stamps may have had larger print runs but present different problems. Take the 1 rouble imperforate of the DVR Monogram issue. 3000-5000 were issued, depending on which source you believe, so that doesn't make them that hard to find, compared to some of the stamps with smaller print runs. Postally used copies to turn up - one wonders where they came from?

But on cover?

You need to get very very lucky to find these stamps on cover, and you're not helped by the odd fact that almost no parcel cards or money orders are known from the Vladivostok area from 1918-1923, since those are usually a good source of postally-used high values.

9-fold weight registered letter from Vladivostok to USA

This cover is one of very few that I've seen, and the only one with a single franking. It also appears to be non-philatelic. In 27 years of collecting that makes it the only one I've ever seen. Rare!

From Collection to Exhibit (1)

A collection can take many forms. I’ve seen collections that were so exquisitely organized they might as well have served as reference works. Others, including some of my own, are more in the “primitive accumulation” phase and a little chaotic as a result. Most collections will fall somewhere in between those two extremes.

If you have made the decision to exhibit part of that collection, the question arises of what you’re going to exhibit and how you’re going to exhibit it. The first thing to realize is that you’ll have to pick a clear subject to exhibit. As an example, I collect Paraguay, 1900-1945, stamps and postal history, but that’s a huge subject to exhibit! I’d have to pick a small subset of that to exhibit, for example the proofs and essays of that period, or postal rates for airmail. Something that will fit into a reasonable number of frames, before I go bankrupt on frame fees.

Once I have picked my subject, it’s time to start thinking about a plan. The general outlines of a plan will usually be obvious just from the subject. A study of postal rates will divide quite easily into rate periods; or rates for particular classes of mail; or mail to particular destinations or…okay, perhaps not quite that obvious.

You see the problem: you’ll have to make some choices. A clear plan is crucial for a successful exhibit and frankly, it just helps you tell the “story” of your exhibit much more easily. Here’s a simple trick that I’ve found helpful: make a list of what you feel are the really nice items in your collection that you’d like to include.

Making a list like that is easy for any collector. We know our collections, we know which items are the important items and we know which items are the most attractive items (and we will grudgingly admit that they might not be the same items as the important items). From that list we can see the outlines of a plan appearing, and maybe even more: the list might suggest that we need to strengthen some areas of weakness in our collection to bring it in line with a good plan for the exhibit.

Let me give you an example. Say I’m putting together an exhibit of Russian post offices in China. The first thing I’ll have to decide is if I want to focus on the stamps that were issued for these offices or on the postal history. Not too many stamps were issued, and it might be tough to fill more than 3-4 frames with this stuff (even including postal uses). So forget that, I’ll go for a postal history exhibit. I browse through my many albums of these covers (I hasten to add that this example is completely hypothetical) and select 30 covers I really like. And I see some problems developing. I have 10 really nice covers from Peking…that’s going to make the Peking office a little over-exposed. And I don’t have any nice covers from Hankow. I know they’re out there – I’ve seen them! – but I just haven’t found one for my collection yet. Since I can’t really ignore the Hankow office and its postal history I may have to either wait until I’ve found some Hankow covers, or rethink the exhibit and make it a “Peking Only” exhibit, for example.

And that leads me to the most heart-breaking decision any aspiring exhibitor has to make. I might have to leave some material I really like out of the exhibit, either because there are too many similar items in the exhibit already, or because it just doesn’t fit into what seems to be the logical plan for the exhibit. Curses! Take some time to shake your fist at the heavens and then get over it. Look on the bright side: maybe you’ve just discovered you really have some duplicate items, and selling them might enable you to buy some material you’re missing.

The final step is to take that list of “star” items and see if you can build a logical exhibit around it. A useful trick here is to start with a really rough plan and use that to decide roughly how much stuff goes into each part of the plan. You can then see if some sections are “bloated” and others are a little anemic, and change your plan (or the items you include) accordingly. By the way, it is always easier to make a selection from the material you have available, then it is to find you have just enough material to fill the frames, so choose your number of frames wisely.

OBRAZETS madness

Obrazets. The word, meaning "specimen", was printed on or perforated through specimen stamps of the Russian Empire and the USSR. Such specimina are very collectable and they all seem to be different. The 1905 War Orphans set came in sheets of 8 stamps across and the temptation to overprint those sheets with one letter per stamp - "Obrazets" was 8 letters in pre-1918 spelling - was impossible to resist, so you can find stamps of this issue with one letter of the word printed on the front.

A few years ago, some eBay vendor (I forget his name) started offering rather a lot of Obrazets material. All of the perforated variety, but interesting nevertheless. However, after the third lot my spider-sense started tingling. Here are a few examples:

 Okay, this one I almost believe.

Wait, what?

WHAA...? 

No. Just no.

On KOLCHAKS? OH fer chrissakes...

So it seems pretty clear that someone has been busy with his very own Obrazets perforator. Buyer beware...

Azerbaijan and its damn imperfs!

Post-Soviet Azerbaijan. What can one say? For many people this is just one of those republics. Not Russia or something that ignorant Westerners think is "kind of Russian" like Ukraine or Belarus. Definitely not a Baltic State! Not Georgia (as if anyone cares. Is anyone collecting Georgia? Hello? Is this microphone working?) and very, VERY not Armenia. Armenia has an international community of emigres collecting it like crazy and any mention of Azerbaijan tends to produce deep frowns. And when an Armenian frowns, it's a serious frown. Not a Central Asian republic (although I've heard one US journalist calling it Azerbaistan. And yes, this man can vote!).

I have a big soft spot for Azerbaijan. I blame Thomas Goltz, whose utterly non-objective book "Azerbaijan diary" is such a great read about the 1991-1993 period.

Philatelically, Azerbaijan has been pretty much a normal post-Soviet republic. High inflation, check. Big stocks of USSR stationery, check. Overprints, check. Cult of personality, big check. Azerbaijan? Might as well call it Alievistan! Non-philatelic covers are difficult to get hold of outside of a few archives addressed to Kiev and Minsk. So, fun for any collector, and cheap too.

However. Azerbaijan? We need to have a little chat. It's about those imperforate stamps. At first a few stray sets magically appeared without perforation, and we have that bloody French printer to thank for that (and Trevor Pateman to figure out what was happening and get the information). Then things got very quiet for awhile. Three sets from 1994 (birds of prey, big cats and football) started turning up imperforate on eBay/Delcampe. And then...it seems just about every single issue now also "appears" imperforate. You can get them without too much trouble in Moscow, I believe. They seem to receive very little distribution (and indeed interest) outside of the former USSR.

What's going on, Azerbaijan? Why!? You were doing so well!

In praise of the recent (1): Guyana's overprint madness, 1981-1985

Guyana, the only English-speaking country in South America, has built up a dubious philatelic reputation since its independence in 1970. The first 10 years were uneventful enough, but after that, Guyana pursued an issue policy that lifted eyebrows to stratospheric heights around the globe. During the 1990s, the policy was mostly one of excess, with miniature sheets and thematic issues on the wildest variety of subjects galore. Often these issues were distressingly “gimmicky”: cut-to-shape sheets, gold and silver embossing, etc. Your basic run-of-the-mill philatelic abuser.

During the second half of the 1980s, it was orchids: Guyana issued an improbable number of stamps illustrating orchids (taken from a famous illustrated book on Reichenbachia), including surcharges, overprints, etc. Again, mercenary motives were probably at work here.

But it was before that, during the first half of the 1980s, that Guyana first gained a reputation for philatelic eccentricity. Starting in May 1981, Guyana almost ceased issuing new stamps altogether and simply overprinted the apparently vast stocks of older issues again and again, with new face values, new purposes or both. While it is again tempting to think of this as aimed at collectors only, the truth was a little more complicated than that.

Since its independence in 1970, Guyana had been under the enlightened leadership of a man with the wonderful name of Linden Forbes Sampson Burnham. Guyana was declared to be a “Co-operative Republic” and various more or less eccentric economic policies were pursued, including nationalization of several large industries.

Sadly, the oil crises of the 1970s had their effect on Guyana’s economy as well. Briefly put, the country ran out of money, crippled by a huge foreign debt and further handicapped by admirable but expensive government policies. Under those circumstances it was quite understandable that no more hard currency reserves could be spent on having stamps printed abroad. Instead, existing stocks of stamps were simply overprinted locally whenever the need for a new stamp issue arose.

More than half of these overprinted/surcharged stamps used the “Flower” definitives of 1971-1976 (Scott 133-147) as their raw material. These were charming stamps, issued in sheets of 25 that made them very suitable for further overprinting. Four values exist in two different perforations and the 25c stamp exists in two different designs but other than that it’s an uncomplicated set of stamps. During the 1970s, three stamps had been given a new face value by overprinting them – hardly excessive – and most of the set had been overprinted “REVENUE ONLY” to serve as revenue stamps in 1975.

But starting in 1981 with commemorative surcharges to celebrate the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer, the Guyana authorities went overprint-happy and issued over 300 different overprints or combinations of overprints on the “Flower” definitives, mostly during the first half of the 1980s. These issues fall roughly into three groups:

1. Revaluations. Guyana was no stranger to inflation and postal rates increased during this period, creating demand for stamps of higher face values.
2. Commemorations. Anything from Boy Scout Centenaries to religious festivals was honored with a commemorative overprint.
3. “Repurposing” (if you’ll forgive me this ugly word). Postage stamps were turned into Official stamps, or parcel post stamps, or official parcel post stamps and then back into postage stamps again. And the revenue overprints of 1975 joined in the fun as well.

You might be forgiven if you think this was all exploitative rubbish, designed to separate collectors from their hard-earned cash, but the truth is that many or most of these issues were widely available throughout Guyana, were used to frank mail and often filled a need, as the scarce Guyanese covers of this period show

What makes these issues so challenging to collect is that identifying a given stamp correctly can take quite a slog through the catalogs, and some catalogs are more helpful than others. I’ve found the Michel catalog very useful since it not only notes on which stamp a given stamp was overprinted, but also which subsequent overprints appeared on that stamp. Scott collects overprints of similar appearance into groups, which is not always helpful, and neither Scott nor Stanley Gibbons is very good at noting which subsequent overprints appeared on a given stamp. In the end I produced my own catalog of these issues, including a 3-catalog cross-reference and found it time well spent.

As a taste of the madness, the $2 stamp (Scott 146) is a good introduction. It exists with 13 different overprints (two of them on previously unissued overprints). In addition, various further overprints were later placed on 5 of these, creating 22 different stamps with two overprints. For example, the $1.10 “Royal Wedding” surcharge (Scott 333) exists with no fewer than 10 different “second generation” overprints. Finally, on 9 occasions a third overprint was added to two previous overprints, so even without trying hard there are 44 collectable stamps based on that $2 stamp alone. I’ll also point out that the basic stamp exists in at least 2 very different shades, creating plenty of room for further variety, and that overprint varieties and errors do exist, although they are surprisingly scarce.

In all, I’ve found these stamps a pleasure to collect, and finding them used on cover is a nice challenge. Gold-embossed Mickey Mouse stamps, no thanks, but these overprinted “Flower” definitives are a lot of serious philatelic fun.