In the past weeks I’ve been digging my way through the gigantic lot of of Czechoslovakian stamps I bought on start of the year. One of the most common designs in this mixture has been the 1945/47 definitive series displaying portraits of Czechoslovak independence movement key figures: Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, Edvard Beneš and Milan Rastislav Štefánik.

Basic catalog listings for the series appear pretty boring. Of the sixteen designs (by Jindra Schmidt) twelve are engravings, and four (50h,80h,1.60K and 15K) are photogravures. Despite of large print runs (between 2-250 million copies) no varieties are listed. The photogravure stamps have comb perforation of 14, the engraved stamps have line perforation of 12½. When looking at fine details of engraved stamps, one can only wonder why the inferior photogravure was ever taken into use.

Specialized Czechoslovakian stamp catalog (Pofis) notes that the 2.40 Koruna stamp exists in two types. Type I has elliptical “0″ in value shield, type II has more rounded “0″ in value shield.

While sorting the lot, I quickly noticed that about every 50th stamps had an unusual (usually bluish) non-dated cancellation with just year. After some poking around, I learned these were provisional rubber cancellations used temporarily after the second world war. Yet another nice way to add a bit of spice to collecting the series:

Even more exited I got when I stumbled with this: a US Civil Censorship / Munich cancellation. After some Googling I found out that postmarks like this were used from the end of World War 2 to early 1950s to (machine) cancel censored mail within German boundaries. So likely this was once on top of cover sent from Czechoslovakia to Germany. I think I could not have ask for any bit better strike for this

All in all I had quite a lot of fun time sorting the series. Despite catalogs don’t state, it would appear there are more than just one shade for each stamp (especially 50 Halery and 15 Koruna photogravure stamps). And I did come up with few minor perforation freaks (such as long/short stamps) .

Exchange offer

Now that I’ve taken what I need for my collection, I’ve still got 1,000+ used spares floating around. As I have no use for these, I’d like to try exchanging these into something more useful.

The available mixture is plenty of some values (3,4,5 and 10 Koruna), and not so much with others (anything from few copies to < 100 copies). Overall quality should be pretty good, several nice cancellations from the era 1945-1950 era (including couple of US Civil Censorship cancellations, but none are so good as the one pictured above).

If you can provide either 250 large stamps or 500 small stamps, postally used, preferrably all different / mixed worldwide, please drop me a line, and I’m sure we can work out an exchange. I can also consider splitting the mixture into 2-3 smaller lots (with roughly same 4:1 or 2:1 exchange proportions).

Once again, happy collecting folks!

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