Lately I’ve been re-organizing my collection of German stamps, and decided to share something not so common with You once again. This is 110 pfennig commemorative stamp from 1998 series displaying German State Parliaments. I’ts a pretty unimpressive looking stamp on the first view with some short perfs and machine cancellation. But if you take a more closer look, you’ll notice plenty of bizarre stuff going on. AFAIK, this appears to be unlisted print variety in Michel.
I’m a general worldwide collector, but I do love to dig in deeper too. My current approach in building “slightly specialized” country collections, as I pick up any easy-to-spot differences I happen to come across. And then I randomly do dig in a lot deeper (like with the Hungarian Castle-definitives or GRD 5-year plan definitives).
When I wrote shortly about these stamps last week, I had no idea what kind of thrilling research adventure I’d be taken into. I thought I had picked a somewhat simple series to play with for upcoming weekend (as well as for blog topic), but boy I was wrong. I did have a superb weekend when digging up resources and researching stamps from the series. This post contains updated bits and pieces, as well as more detailed information about the series. And then there are plenty of scans from my collection.
Though errors on stamps are usually rare and expensive, there are luckily few exceptions. The United States “Dag Hammarskjold invert” error of 1962 was the first invert error to occur on any United States stamp since 1918 Inverted Jenny. And AFAIK, it is the second deliberately mass-produced error stamp worldwide (the first one I believe is DDR 5-year plan 20/24pfg definitive stamp).
Here’s an interesting minor variety I found during the weekend while placing some recent additions to my stamp collection. The below image shows two copies of CTO-used 20 shilling Kenyan 1971 seashell definitive stamps.
Here’s another item from EFO (”Error-Freak-Oddity”) collection that I’ve been lately building alongside my worldwide stamps collection. It’s 1961 Congo (Kinshasa/Zaire) 20c (mint) stamp with heavily shifted overprint.