The Crimean "little" offices

As I may have mentioned once of twice, I like postmarks from the Crimea. After years of collecting and gathering information I've now recorded 230 postmarks from the Imperial period and 224 from the Soviet period (up to the final "ASSR" type), and I'm still finding new postmarks regularly.
Some postmarks are easier to find than others, of course. Railway postmarks (apart from Sevastopol' Vokzal) are pretty thin on the ground - I'm still looking for a Kerch' railway postmark for instance - and Volostnoe Pravlenie postmarks are downright rare. Seasonal offices are another group that's rarely seen.
Kerch' actually managed to cram 4 offices into its area: Kerch', Kerch' Railway, Kerch' Krepost and Kerchenskii Zavod. The latter is another office you'll rarely see:

Then there are the Town Sub-offices. Unsurprisingly, Sevastopol' and Simferopol' both had Town sub-offices, although examples are not easy to find. The one that really surprised me was Feodosiya:

By the way, both postmarks have a "1" at foot which I think implied that these were considered to be the 1st sub-office of the main post office. 

Town sub-offices are not listed in the invaluable Kiryushkin-Robinson list of Imperial Russian post offices, so each one that turns up is a surprise. I wonder how many more there are?

A little relic of Turkmenistan

Turkmenistan is, shall we say, not widely collected. I happen to like the combination of obscurity and cheapness that countries like this offer, so I have a mild interest in Turkmenistan stamps and postal history. I appear to be in a very small minority.
A few months ago I tripped over a little "find": a large-ish lot of progressive proofs for the first Turkmenistan stamps, issued in August 1992 (disregarding two hastily-retooled USSR stamp issues from earlier that year). It's a lot of stuff! For each of the 7 stamps (counting the two mirror versions of the president Nyazov stamp) and the souvenir sheet in the set there are from 13 to 21 of these proofs. These stamps were printed using 4 colors (red, yellow, black and blue; sometimes gold was used as well) and for each value the lot contains proofs of the individual color plates, as well as 2, 3 and 4-color combination proofs. All are unperforated.

Proof of the black plate for the 15,0 stamp

For the miniature sheet, 20 of these proofs are present, such as:

Proof of the red and black plates

How did all this fun stuff end up on the market? Here I have to speculate a little, but I think here is what happened. These stamps were printed by Specialty Printers of America in Scranton, Pennsylvania. That company was bought by the Mack Printing Group, which eventually became Cadmus Communication Corporation. My theory is that in the changes of ownership some archival material went missing. I've seen occasional other eyebrow-raising items from this issue, such as a complete unperforated printing sheet of one value, but this lot of proofs is the biggest I've seen.

Is it philatelically relevant? Only if you're very interested in the printing process. personally, I find the progressive proofs interesting, and I'm toying with the idea of having the proofs for the souvenir sheet framed. Besides, it was cheap (and obscure!).

Back! Let's talk about the Joy of Singles

I do apologize to my (entirely hypothetical) readers for my absence. Let's just say my job became even more interesting than usual and leave it at that.
I was rummaging through some old albums and found a little stash of Single Frankings. I collected these quite avidly for the 1924-1940 period at one time, but got rid of most of them after awhile. I did keep the examples from the Second Standard issue, or the Large Heads as we westerners think of them.
Most of the middle values in this set are easily found as single frankings (which is defined as an item of mail franked with one example of a stamp, paying the correct rate and preferably in the right period), although the 50k starts getting a little more difficult. But it's the extreme values of the set that present the most problems.

The 80k is hard to find as a single. Here's a cheat:

This is a scarce postcard from the extensive correspondence between professor Popov in Irkutsk and E. Colaco Belmonte in Sydney, Australia. Most of this correspondence consists of very nicely franked airmail covers, but there are a few postcards too, this being one of them. So why is it a cheat? Because 80k wasn't the right rate: this registered airmail postcard to Australia should have been franked with 70k. 

Here's how to do it properly:

By 1935 the rate for a Speshnoe letter was 80k, so this is the correct franking. 1935 is a bit late for a Large head, but the stamps of that issue can be found used normally throughout the early/mid-1930s, so I'm saying it's acceptable. This, by the way, is the easiest form of an 80k single franking.

On the other end of the spectrum there's the (also orange) 1k stamp. As far as I can tell, this would have paid for local printed matter, which has a low probability of survival. But, we all get lucky sometimes:

Life is good! And with a table of postal rates at your side, this way of collecting stamps on cover is a lot of fun.

In praise of the recent (3): the "Voice of America" correspondence

One little project that I was really looking forward to is going through approx. 1200 covers sent from various ex-USSR countries during the first three months of 1992: responses to a lottery organized by the "Voice of America" radio station. I like big bulky lots as you can actually do some simple statistics and you get a good feel for the range of postal phenomena. And who wouldn't like going through a pristine archive?

These covers are a little puzzling since they're all unopened. I don't know what the explanation is. Perhaps all these covers arrived after the deadline? It does make me a little sad to think that all these hopefuls were doomed to disappointment.

Let's start with the basics. Of the 1200 covers or so, mere handfuls are from Azerbaijan and Georgia. Armenia is a little better represented, with about a dozen covers. Central Asia varies from Kazakhstan (15) to Kyrgyzstan (1). Ukraine is inexplicably underrepresented with a mere 15 covers. Belarus shows up with 36 covers, and Moldova with 5. The three Baltic States have about 30 covers each. Everything else is Russia. Note that this geographical distribution simply reflects participation in the lottery, not some aspect of the postal systems in question.

Frankings are almost exclusively Soviet definitives (and Baltic definitives for the Baltic states, although even there you see a few late usages of Soviet stamps). The oddballs are the St.Petersburg surcharges, the Azeri use of radio stamps on one cover, and manuscript revaluations of Soviet definitives on four covers. The first Russian stamps also appear, sparingly.

(To be continued)

In praise of the recent (2): Dutch definitive disarray

Almost unnoticed by most Dutch collectors, the standard Dutch definitive stamps with an abstract portrait of Queen Beatrix spawned a large number of collectable varieties, booklets and less easily categorized items.

The first of the stamps designed by Peter Struycken appeared in 1981, but three major changes over the next 20 years or so changed the face of Dutch definitive stamps forever. The first of these changes was a simple change in design, from the original 1981 design (black design on a colored background) to the so-called "inverted design" (colored design on a white background), which first appeared in 1991. The second change was the change in currency, from the Dutch Guilder to the Euro. The final and most far-reaching change was a major change in the way stamps are produced and sold.

First issue: uncomplicated stamps

Stamps in the original Struycken design showing an abstract portrait of Queen Beatrix background were first issued in 1981, and over a period of 10 years 16 different values appeared. The design was not universally popular and was mocked as "the Queen Bee". The colors chosen were a drab assembly of pastels, including no fewer than 6 shades of green and 4 shades of violet. The stamps were issued in sheets of 100, while 8 values appeared as coil stamps (imperforate on two sides) and 2 values were issued in stamp booklets (imperforate on one or two sides). A simple enough issue for the collector. Perhaps it lulled collectors to sleep, leaving them unprepared for what was to follow.

Second issue: the "inverted" design

From 1991 to 2000, a total of 14 values in the "inverted" design were issued. Again, 5 stamps were also issued as coil stamps. But during the second half of the 1990s, the Dutch postal authorities started issuing more and more self-adhesive stamps, and 5 values in this set were also issued as self-adhesives, printed and sold in mini-sheetlets of 5 stamps. The mini-sheetlets were a new phenomenon: a hybrid between a sheetlet and a booklet. At the time these went more or less unnoticed as most of the attention had gone to commemorative stamps which were being issued in sheetlets of 10, to the horror of collectors. But during the 1990s, the way in which stamps were sold changed. Counter sheets from which the required number of stamps would be torn were vanishing. Stamps were sold to customers in pre-packaged blocks (initially cut from regular sheets, later specially printed), and the small mini-sheetlets of 5 filled the gap for those customers for whom these pre-packaged blocks of 50 or 100 were far too large a purchase. By the beginning of the new century, the old counter sheets of 100 had practically disappeared.

The initial and somewhat experimental pre-packaged blocks did spawn some interesting varieties. The stamp of 1 guilder was printed in sheetlets of 25 for a planned "mailer" (as the pre-packaged products were known), but the mailer never appeared and the small number of printed sheets was quietly sold off. Two other values in the set (0.80 and 1.60) were printed and sold in these sheets of 25, in mailers of 25 and 50 stamps.

The mini-sheetlets of self-adhesive stamps were printed by Walsall Security Printers, and it was soon discovered that the WSP-printed stamps differed from the original design as printed by Johan Enschedé: 3 of the dots making up the portrait were missing. As a final complication, the self-adhesive stamps were not popular with collectors who complained that the adhesive was leaking out around the edges. The 5 self-adhesive stamps were also made available to collectors in a special printing for which the backing paper was die-cut all the way through.

Third issue: the Euro-denominated stamps

After one stamp appeared in 2001 with the denomination both in guilders and in Euro as a transitional measure (only as self-adhesive in sheetlet of 5), the "inverted" design started appearing in Euro denominations from 2002 onwards. No more counter sheets for the Euro stamps - these were only issued as self-adhesive stamps in sheetlets of 5 (and, starting in 2007, of 10).

The first 8 stamps to appear in 2002 still had the three missing dots that the self-adhesive guilder-denominated stamps had also had. 3 values were issued in 2003 with a corrected portrait that restored the three missing dots, but these inexplicably also had the text rearranged slightly so they were easily identifiable. Later issues of new values had the restored portrait and the old arrangement of text on the stamps. Again, many of these stamps were also made available with the backing paper die-cut all the way through.

By now, what should have been a modest definitive issue had become a ripe field for specialization. The "official" NVPH catalog was slow to realize all this but the 2008 edition included a full listing of the various mailers, mini-sheetlets and other new phenomena for the first time. Already, the earlier mailers are fetching high prices, as they were not recognized as collectable varieties when they appeared, and a lot of Dutch collectors are playing catch-up in a field of dizzying complexity. A first handbook of these issues also appeared during 2007, while the (bilingual) website of a philatelic journalist who was one of the first to understand the complexity of these issues is an invaluable guide.

A tale of two small cities in Poland

Take a look at this cover. It was sent in February 1824 From Warsaw to France. It has 5 postal markings, in order:

• A Warsaw postmark
• A Strzalkowo postmark
• T.P. which stands for "Transit Prusse" or Prussian transit
• R.No.5. This is worth a blog all by itself but briefly, it means the French regarded it as an unpaid letter from Prussia's 5th Raion - that part of Prussia the furthest removed from the French border
• Prusse Par Givet: a French marking (actually applied in Paris)  simply denoting that this Prussian letter had entered France at Givet, and that French internal postage was to be calculated from Givet to its destination, Rheims.

Since the Strzalkowo postmark is similar to the Memel postmarks you see on many Russian letters from this period you might conclude that this is a Prussian postmark, and that it denoted where the letter entered Prussia. You would be right. Since Strzalkowo is in Prussia's 5th Raion, that also fits with the R.No.5 marking. Apparently Polish domestic postage had been prepaid but after it left Poland it was all unpaid. The "17" is the final charge to the addressee of 17 decimes. 

Strzalkowo is still around: you'll find it due West of Warsaw and yes, the Prussian border really used to be there. It wasn't until 1945 that Poland was forcibly relocated a few hundred kilometers to the West.

Now take a look at this letter:

This letter, from February 1818, went from Warsaw to Leipzig in Saxony. It has a similarly Prussian-looking postmark of Slupce. Slupce is now called Slupca and it is right next door to Strzalkowo, about 4 kilometers closer to Warsaw. What's going on?

The postal history of Poland in the 19th century is as complicated as its history. Recall that Napoleon had re-created a "Grand Duchy of Warsaw" as a rump Polish state. After Napoleon's defeat, the Vienna Congress decided to once again slide and dice Polish lands between Russian, Prussia and Austria, but the Russian share was made into a Kingdom of Poland, which just happened to have the Russian Tsar as its king. Poland  had an independent postal system from the moment of its rebirth, and it slowly got going in 1817. At the time, Slupce was in Prussia and it was the Prussian entry point for westbound mail from Poland. However, in 1817, Prussia and Poland (re)defined the border between the two states more exactly, and by that treaty (signed in late 1817 and ratified in February 1818) Slupca became Polish and Strzalkowo became the new Prussian entry point for Polish mail. So for a very brief period (about February 1817-March 1818) you will see a Prussian Slupce as entry marking for Polish mail, and after that, Strzalkowo takes over.

The best literature on this stuff is probably the series of articles written by Ilse Popp for the Deutsche Altbrief Sammler-Verein. They're impossible to find, but priceless.

The forgotten nation: UkrSSR

If you look at this 1926 cover you probably won't spot anything out of the ordinary. It took me literally decades to realize that we're seeing an example of an odd and short-lived class of postmarks.

When Ukraine had its much-interrupted first period of independence in 1918-1920, it introduced new postmarks which were in Ukrainian, not Russian. My Russian is terrible and my Ukrainian nonexistent, but you can usually spot them simply because the spelling is different from what you're used to, e.g. Kiiv instead of Kiev, Kharkiv instead of Kharkov, etc. A few of them lasted well beyond Ukrainian independence into the mid-late 1920s.

But - and here's where it gets interesting - when many of the Union Republics that constituted the USSR started issuing new postmarks during the 1920s, the postmarks were bilingual: Russian and the local language. So yes, the Ukrainian SSR introduced many of these bilingual postmarks during the 1920s. However, there were some places (not many) that introduced all-Ukrainian postmarks, and apparently Tsibuliv (Tsybulevo in pre-Revolutionary times) in Kiev Oblast' was one of them.

They're worth looking out for, but count on seeing them very rarely. And by the way, the whole Ukrainian SSR period is almost a white spot on the philatelic map: apart from the "Index" postal code introduced in the 1930s I don't know of any subjects from this period  that have been studied, let alone exhibited.

It's a pity because Ukraine was actually a very interesting place, politically. The conscious policy of korenizatsiya or "indiginization" led to growing national consciousness as Ukrainian communists tried to develop a separate national identity within the USSR. There's a great book on the subject, James Mace's "Communism and the dilemmas of national liberation" that follows the process and its abrupt end in the early 1930s. I wonder if the maker of this Tsibuliv postmark was charged with nationalist deviations during the Purges....