Robot Claw

It’s time for some more stamps! This time, trains:

I didn’t actually choose these when I did my order. I chose another topic that it turns out was out of stock, so (at my request) these were substituted. They were very inexpensive: I think about $3 for 100?

The pack contained slightly over 100 stamps, and I forgot to take a photo of them all together! So here I’ll showcase the stamps from some (but not all) of the countries. They seem to be mostly issued between 1980 and 2000.

As with mushrooms and dinosaurs, almost all of these are CTO stamps, which means machine canceled and unused. They come from the same countries as well; and my guess is very few of any of these were ever sold for actual postage use.

Take Mongolia for instance, a country not known for its rail heritage. The stamps are pretty enough, but the likelihood is they were printed in Europe or the USA under license from some Mongolian government office who likely had nothing at all to do with their design. I wonder could I take these to Mongolia, put them on a postcard, and expect it to arrive?

The same can be said for Burkina Faso:

And São Tomé:

And North Korea:

Cuba is of note since they issued a series of CTO stamps celebrating Japanese bullet trains!?! One can only imagine this was done to market to Japanese collectors:

And of course let’s not forget Kampuchea/Cambodia, which based on the contents of this pack has issued a ludicrous amount of train stamps. Given the then-recent history of that country, I’m slightly surprised ‘they’ issued so many CTO stamps:

The above stamps are from the Soviet Union, and the one on the lower left was used (it’s a real postmark and the stamp has no gum). I assume the USSR issued CTOs (almost every country has) but as far as I can tell the above are all ‘real’ stamps issued for actual postal use. My favorite stamp in the packet is the top left one above, which also happened to be the most monochromatic!

The Czech stamp on the left above has also been used, and at least one (and probably both) of the Romanian ones on the right was as well. Both of these are examples from larger issues, which supports my theory that these are ex-post rather than just bought from a wholesaler.

So in a packet of 100+ stamps it seems only three were actually used. This is not surprising given the nature of the product, but given that trains as a topic ate so popular I would have liked to see a few more examples of ‘real’ train stamps from around the world! My pack of Australian stamps for instance contained several, and the USA has issued well over 100 train stamps during the last 75 years.

Who knows… maybe the next pack of stamps I open might have some trains in it! What will that pack be? Find out next month 🙂

I had fun with those Dinosaur stamps a few months back, and decided to dip my toes back into the world of ‘topical collecting’. So I made an order at a stamp shop for a few inexpensive packets of stamps in various categories, and over the next few months I’ll go through them here on the blog.

Let’s start right now with… mushroom stamps!

100 stamps cost me about $5. I chose mushrooms because they were cheap and I was amused that they existed as a category (“Why mushrooms?”). It wasn’t clear if the packet was 100 unique stamps or whether there would be doubles. Let’s see:

There were no doubles! In total there were 104 unique stamps from 14 countries: Mongolia, Afghanistan, Benin, Paraguay, Romania, Burkana Faso, North Korea, São Tomé and Principe, Kampuchea (Cambodia), Guyana, Guinea, Nicaragua, Hungary and the Soviet Union (Russia). The country from which I had the most was North Korea, with 12 stamps.

The stamps spanned 28 years from 1968 to 2006. The above example is one of the two oldest stamps and is North Korean. It’s also one of only a small handful that have been actually used, since (as with the dinosaur stamps) almost all of these are CTO stamps made for collectors and machine canceled. Most are therefore still gummed.

There’s a bewildering variety! The above (from Mongolia in 1985) are diagonally printed and very large and some of the prettiest in the packet.

Quite a few were still attached, like these Romanian ones from 1985. Most were illustrations, but there were some photographic stamps as well.

My favourites are probably the stamps from Hungary. Not only do they feature lovely line art, but they are actually textured and the ink seems slightly iridescent. This series contains stamps in two sizes as well, and these bigger ones must have looked lovely on a letter back in 1984!

Incidentally just because these are (mostly) CTO stamps doesn’t mean they weren’t also used for mail. Researching these stamps I found examples of some of them that had gone through the post, so unlike most of the dinosaur stamps it’s likely some of these were used by postal customers when they were released.

So why so many mushroom stamps?!? I’ve learned this is one of the most popular categories for topical stamps, and a catalogue printed only few months ago lists 6144 unique mushroom stamps! So my 104 is only 1.7% of those that exist. It’s a good thing I hate mushrooms else I may be tempted to chase them all 🙂

And so they’ve gone into my album, which still has lots of space left to fill. It’s a good thing I have several packets left to open…