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.