A hoard of Austria revenues

At the last stamp show where we had a table, one of the other dealers brought a box full of stock books of pre-1940 stamps from various countries.   The Austria books were some of the best stocks of classics I have ever seen.

I ended up buying a book that was all Austria offices abroad and revenue stamps.  The offices in Turkey and Crete were fine but while those have had a lot of reprints and forgeries, this batch looked better than most.  Same with the page of Lombardy-Venetia.  I put together about two hundred lots of sets and singles, and a few bulk batches -- you hardly ever see these in batches of 50 or 100 or more.

What really caught my eye were the eight pages packed with revenues.   Almost all were from the 1870 series so the variety was not nearly as wide as I thought at the time.   Trying to find a value for revenues is tricky, since the dependable catalogs can be 20-30 years or of date.   So if a stamp listed for $50 but that price is from 20 years ago, what does it really mean?


I found some online references but the only one that would hazard s guess said they were of minimal value.   Really?   All values are the same?

The Barefoot & Hall catalog of Austria Revenues was last updated in 2019.  That's more recent than most of these.

Austrian Philately has a good overview page for these.

I routinely see small batches listed on eBay or HipStamp for about $1 a stamp, and have often picked up batches of revenues from around the world for about the 50c to $1 each when I want to see some new stamps I have not had in my hands before.  I guess I just have to make a variety of lots of all sizes and see what happens.

I always liked the designs on these.  The underlying pattern is a leaf with natural vein patterns.  They are mostly on very delicate paper that's partly translucent, but some are on more robust paper.  There are a few different currency types here, and since they were used in the Austro-Hungarian Empire they can be found in Austrian currency or Hungarian currency.

Here are some from this batch, made into a lot, ready to find new homes.



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