Post by mourningdoves on May 19, 2020 21:52:08 GMT -5
I thought I'd have some time to get stampy while the great state of Connecticut is under quarantine. But it hasn't worked out quite as hoped.
But over the last couple of days, I got to work on cleaning out two collection remnants for Austria. One of them was actually in two Lighthouse hingeless albums, the ones with mounts built right in and attached to the page. Some of those hingeless mounts are getting old and cracked, though whether that was because they get old and cracked after 40 or 50 years or because the books were kept under less than ideal conditions, I'll never know.
The former collector was something like me, it seems; if mint and used copies of a particular stamp were more or less equally available, this person would go for the used one. I also noted that the scarcer one or two in a long series tended to have heavy cancels or a bit of foxing/yellowing. This held true even of the "scarce" one listed for 90¢ instead of 30¢. Is it a bit unusual that a collection like that would be housed in a ritzy pair of springback hingeless binders? Maybe the person treated definitives as "just fill the space" material and saved energy for the ornate semis and historically significant issues. I don't know. With Austrian stamps, it's hard to tell, because many of the non-definitives are easier to find mint - even MNH - than postally used.
Collection remnants and anarchic bags of stamps are my favorite acquisition methods, and I like to wonder about previous owners.
Anyway, enough with idle thoughts and unprovable conjectures! I filled a page!
The set is a definitive series that started in 1924. What caught my attention is that the numeric lower-denomination stamps look like 1920s stamps. But the higher-denomination ones - the mini-pictorials - are completely different. If I didn't know anything about Austrian stamps and someone showed me a couple of these things and told me they were from 1955 or 1961, I'd probably believe it. More than most stamps, these seem detached from any particular era in design.
What do you guys think? If you had to guess their age, what would you say?
The one tipoff may be that they use an older form of "s" in "Österreich". I don't know that much about Central European typographic styles, but I haven't often seen that stylized "s" on newer documents or printings that I can recall.
Otherwise, I'm checking duplicates and my general spillover stash for postmarks and amusing myself by saving the Vienna ones that have numbers. Like the United States used to have "Chicago 31, Ill." and "Akron 7, O.", they had "Wien xx" as far back as the 1920s. I found a "Wien 98", so they must have had that system down to the parking meters!
But over the last couple of days, I got to work on cleaning out two collection remnants for Austria. One of them was actually in two Lighthouse hingeless albums, the ones with mounts built right in and attached to the page. Some of those hingeless mounts are getting old and cracked, though whether that was because they get old and cracked after 40 or 50 years or because the books were kept under less than ideal conditions, I'll never know.
The former collector was something like me, it seems; if mint and used copies of a particular stamp were more or less equally available, this person would go for the used one. I also noted that the scarcer one or two in a long series tended to have heavy cancels or a bit of foxing/yellowing. This held true even of the "scarce" one listed for 90¢ instead of 30¢. Is it a bit unusual that a collection like that would be housed in a ritzy pair of springback hingeless binders? Maybe the person treated definitives as "just fill the space" material and saved energy for the ornate semis and historically significant issues. I don't know. With Austrian stamps, it's hard to tell, because many of the non-definitives are easier to find mint - even MNH - than postally used.
Collection remnants and anarchic bags of stamps are my favorite acquisition methods, and I like to wonder about previous owners.
Anyway, enough with idle thoughts and unprovable conjectures! I filled a page!
The set is a definitive series that started in 1924. What caught my attention is that the numeric lower-denomination stamps look like 1920s stamps. But the higher-denomination ones - the mini-pictorials - are completely different. If I didn't know anything about Austrian stamps and someone showed me a couple of these things and told me they were from 1955 or 1961, I'd probably believe it. More than most stamps, these seem detached from any particular era in design.
What do you guys think? If you had to guess their age, what would you say?
The one tipoff may be that they use an older form of "s" in "Österreich". I don't know that much about Central European typographic styles, but I haven't often seen that stylized "s" on newer documents or printings that I can recall.
Otherwise, I'm checking duplicates and my general spillover stash for postmarks and amusing myself by saving the Vienna ones that have numbers. Like the United States used to have "Chicago 31, Ill." and "Akron 7, O.", they had "Wien xx" as far back as the 1920s. I found a "Wien 98", so they must have had that system down to the parking meters!