ScottV Stamps

Just as the Sand Dune issues began to settle down around 1972-74 (see my previous post), the 1970s brought us the very uniform mini sheets of 8 from Staffa and other places ("State of Oman", Eynhallow, Dhufar, Nagaland, more).  Surely, those were the work of one company.  I had a block about 3 inches thick of these at one point, and I go back and forth between thinking they're trash and wondering how uncommon they might be now, almost half a century later.  Most of these were from real islands in Scotland, and all of them would best be described as fake local post issues or just "labels".  I think the description at Conchology.be covers the bases: "These stamps are entrepreneurial labels with no carriage or postal validity and should therefore be classified as BOGUS." I honestly don't know how collectors can look at these and think they are real postage stamps.  Don't we all have thousands of real stamps to compare them to?  They look unfini...

There were thousands of stamps printed with names of emirates like Ajman and Sharjah and Umm al Qiwain between 1964 and 1974.  These were jokingly known as the "sand dunes" or just "dunes" and the stamps were dismissed by serious collectors as "wallpaper".  The British had pulled out of the area and the United Arab Emirates was still just an idea.   There is still a lot of debate about whether they can be counted as postage stamps or whether they were just labels.  Were they valid for postage?  Maybe they were used on mail a few times?  I have never seen a cover that didn't look contrived, or even a postmark that looked valid.  They were almost always cancelled to order.  I used to have Minkus and Michel catalogs that list them, and the very few mint sets I find almost always sell at about $5 per set.  The cancelled sets and souvenir sheets are still common, and I have seen entire shoeboxes full of those.  Do any of them have a real...

(I'm still working on this one.) It is not always clear which stamps are official government issues and which ones are produced by other companies or organizations.  The big catalogs will occasionally mention "unofficial" issues or remove listings after new information becomes available, or refuse to list certain issues as being "illegal".  The Scott catalog recently removed most of the stamps of Afghanistan from the 1990s as being condemned by the government as illegal.  This is a tricky subject.  I mean, the stamps still exist and might even be more rare than the official issues.  Most of the bogus issues across the decades have been designed to appeal to topical collectors, and a collector of dogs on stamps might still want that pictured item whether it was official or not.  But it's still a picture selected or designed to draw someone's interest and try to get their money.  Sometimes the country itself is made up.  But people still buy them....

I have always had a fascination for the pages at the back of a stamp collection.  Those come after all the mass-produced pages where you fill in all the well-known things the catalogs say you should be able to find.  And back here you find the miscellany, the things the couldn't be found in catalogs, or odd little bits that the collector felt were worth saving along with whatever country they follow. One thing that comes up pretty regularly are registration labels.  Here is a batch from Australia that I just sold, a lot that had been sitting on various sites for about 15 years now.  These are all from the state of South Australia.  There is no indication of what year they were printed, but the very low numbers suggest early issues. Like postmarks, I suppose it would make more sense to collect these on complete covers, where you could see the full context of how and when they were used, but I have soaked hundreds of pounds of stamps over the years, I know that th...