Dashnak Armenia: A Small Reward for Looking Closely

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Tidying up my stock the other day, I came across these three stamps in a packet. I was about to add them to a section of common 5r Dashnak Armenian overprints when I realised they were not quite right. They are, in fact, overprinted centrally with a 3r handstamp and its accompanying monogram above. So that suggests they are “counter surcharges” – unofficial combinations of stamps and overprint done as a favour to a collector or dealer. For Dashnak Armenia, Michel does not list these counter surcharges but Gibbons does and so does Ceresa in his handbooks. Both are following the listings in Tchilingirian and Ashford’s books ( now over sixty years old).

But then I noticed something else. On all three stamps, you can find part of a “5r” overprint above and to one side of the 3r overprint. But you cannot find more than a trace of a 5r monogram. What is going on?

I think this is a case where a clerk may have made a genuine mistake and tried to correct it. So these are corrected surcharges, not counter surcharges. To avoid the mess of two monograms, he tilted the 5r handstamp so that the monogram does not print. But this also meant that the 5r does not print properly either. On the dark background, it’s not clear what has happened. Whatever has happened the reuslt is a mess and from a practical point of view, a failure.

All three stamps are from the same sheet – they are all off-centre in the same way. All were signed by Theodore Champion, a careful Paris dealer of the time, and all were later signed RJC [ Dr Ceresa’s first handstamp]. But Ceresa does not list this variety in his Armenia handbook. Perhaps he also put these stamps into a packet and forgot about them.

Dashnak Armenian Stamps: Relative Values

Stefan Berger has just published a short piece on his www.stampsofarmenia.com website about the relative values of Dashnak Armenian stamps. He takes as an example the framed Z overprints of 1920. Correctly in my view, he makes three claims:

- small framed Z overpints are much scarcer than medium or large size framed Z
- black overprints are more common than violet ones, except on one or two values (he lists the 5 rouble imperforate)
- some low value perforated stamps are scarce with these overprints, in any size or colour. He instances the 2 kopeck perforated with black overprint.

Of course, I immediately thought that I had just offered a 2 kopeck perforated with large framed Z in black in the last www.filateliapalvelu.com auction. It had a Stefan Berger Opinion included. I described it as a "scarce value with this overprint" - an understatement, of course, so as not to exaggerate. It sold for 20 euro, the start price, with just one bidder. That's basically giving it away - and that's because very, very few people know what Stefan Berger and I know: it's actually quite a rare stamp.

The real problem is this: there is a very big market in Armenian stamps, mostly on ebay and other sites, dominated by sellers who don't care what they sell and buyers who don't care what they buy. There just aren't many serious collectors of Armenian stamps, just as there are only a few serious collectors of Armenian postal history a couple of whom exhibit at International shows (Nagapetiants, Sarkissian)

Maybe 20 year ago now, I was asked by an Armenian dealer to supply him with stamps. He sold album pages, very nicely produced, aimed at the Armenian "Heritage Collector" market. He explained to me that it didn't matter if the stamps were genuine or forged, his people weren't worried about that. As long as the stamps cost less than the album pages, they would be happy. They would have something to show their families and friends.

That Heritage Collector market has now shifted onto the Internet where it combines with the market of one-of-each collectors or filling-an-album collectors who aren't much worried about rarity or authenticity but who just want some cheap stamps. And in the case of Armenia, there are so many forgeries around, sure, you can have as many cheap stamps as you want.

Matters are not helped by the fact that the catalogues are often useless. Yvert traditonally used forged stamps as the basis of all its illustrations, and now has them in colour; the supposedly specialist Artar catalogue uses a mix of genuine and forged material in its illustrations. Michel has got the structure right but relative prices wildly wrong. Only Stanley Gibbons gets its reasonably right, basing itself on the old Tchilingirian and Ashford listings. (I haven't seen Liapine; Ceresa's pricings are unfortunately spread out over several A4 handbooks but are no longer valid in any case).

It's a bit depressing. If I can only get 20 €uro for a rare stamp with a good certificate (for which I have paid), I may as well give up and start selling forged Armenian stamps on ebay.

 

Rare Stamps Re-United

For twenty years, I have been buying and selling stamps of the Russian Civil War period. Some of them are rare - in fact, quite a lot since there are lots of philatelically-inspired varieties of Armenian and Ukrainian overprints each one of which was only produced in small quantities.

How rare is rare? What quantities? Well, sometimes only a single sheet of 50 or 100 was overprinted in such a way as to create an identifiable variety. Sometimes a few sheets.

In some cases, we have Official Numbers - in John Bulat's catalogue, you will find them, for example, for Ministerial tridents, Kherson tridents, Courier Field Post overprints, and CMT overprints. In general, these figures are very suspect, since they were published by the entrepreneurs who would benefit financially from sales of the stamps. More bluntly, it's highly unlikely that the figures are truthful.

There are ways of  estimating numbers independently of official figures. It's obvious if you think about it.

Suppose I have a stamp which I think is rare - one sheet of 50 or 100. Then if I get a second copy of the same stamp, then it should be identifiable as from the same sheet - same shade of stamp, same paper, same gum, same perforation, same centering, same position of a lithographic or typographic overprint. If it's not from the same sheet, then immediately you know that there were at least two sheets of this stamp.

And so it goes on. In some cases, you will find that every stamp you come across is from a different sheet and so the print number keeps on going up.

Then there are the cases where this does not happen. If your second copy of a stamp is clearly from the same sheet as the first copy - but has come to you from a different source - then this increases the probability that there was indeed only one sheet at the beginning. (Maybe there is a statistician out there who can figure this out).

Of course, everything depends on how independent the second stamp is from the first.

Recently, I bought Peter Ashford's collection of Armenian combined surcharges. Included was a pair of stamps with a 10 rouble surcharge over an existing framed Z overprint on a 70 kopeck imperforate stamp. This is a counter- surcharge (a philatelically-inspired surcharge) since the official scheme specified 25 rouble overprints on 70 kopeck stamps - this is what you will find listed in the Michel catalouge based on Christopher Zakiyan's archival researches. You won't find a 10 rouble surcharge listed there, only in the Stanley Gibbons calogue which is based on Tchilingirian and Ashford's researches.

As it happens I already had another pair of the 10 rouble surcharge. I don't know for sure where I got this, but most likely from Dr Ceresa's collection which in turn was based on Tchilingirian's collection (which Ceresa bought at auction). I pulled out my existing pair - and, hey Presto! - the two pairs fit together. The Ashford pair is at the top.

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Now, in this case, my guess is this: back in the 1950s - over 60 years ago - when Tchilingirian and Ashford were writing Stamps of Armenia they had just one block of 4 of this (rare) variety. They both wanted it in their collection. So they split the block of 4, something they would not normally have done with a postmarked block.

Do you have this stamp in your collection? And is it from the same sheet?

Armenia 1920 Dashnak overprints: an important statistic

It would be wonderful to discover a genuine narrative of day-to-day activity in Erivan post office during 1920.

My guess is that it was essentially a philatelic bureau and that over 90% of all stamps overprinted in the post office were sold to people about to leave Armenia who cashed in their (worthless) Armenian banknotes against postage stamps which in Constantinople, Paris or Berlin could be exchanged for hard currency. I guess there were also a few dealers and speculators who came from Tiflis or Batum or Baku, shopped and left. There should have been no problem paying the salaries of the post office clerks.

In the second half of 1920, the post office began surcharging stamps previously overprinted with framed or unframed Z, at a rate which increased the face value of the stamps by a minimum of 100 times for kopeck values ( 1 kopeck stamps surcharged 1 rouble and so on) and a minimum of 10 times for rouble stamps (10 rouble becoming 100 roubles). This made financial sense but the sensible move came rather late.

Customers at the philatelic counter had already bought most of the stamps originally overprinted with framed Z handstamps, especially the bargain price low values which even when they were overprinted had no postal usefulness - tariffs were already at a minimum of 60 kopecks.

More sheets of the stamps with unframed Zs, overprinted later than the framed Zs, remained.

In the Michel catalogue, combined surcharges on framed Z stamps are listed as Michel 86 - 101; combined surcharges on unframed Z stamps then follow as 102 - 118. My 2006 Michel makes no distinction in the pricing - the stamps are given the same values simply according to the face values of the stamps.

This is a mistake; the framed Z stamps are much, much scarcer. How much scarcer?

Last year I bought Peter Ashford's collection of Combined Surcharges - that's the Ashford of Tchilingirian and Ashford. Today I was looking at the collection and counted 310 stamps. Of those just 32 had framed Z overprints - say 10%. Since Ashford would have been looking to represent as many types as possible, 10 % almost certainly over estimates the proportion of framed Zs among Combined Surcharges. In addition, Combined Surcharges on Imperial kopeck value stamps with a face value below 15 kopecks are extremely rare - there were no longer the basic stamps in stock to use for the second surcharge. It is only when you get to 25, 35 and 50 kopecks that you begin to see framed Zs. Here, for example, is Ashford's page of 35 kopeck stamps surcharged 10 roubles. The five stamps in the top row have framed Zs (Ashford classifies them as E1b, E1b, E4, E6, E6), the rest of the page shows examples of unframed Zs.

Expertising Handstamped Overprints

Because they are handstamped, handstamped overprints are infinitely variable: the way the clerk inks the handstamp can vary infinitely (pressure, angle etc) and the way he or she applies it to the stamp can also vary infinitely.

That causes problems for the would-be Expertiser.

My own strategy is to start with the things which are not infinitely variable.

(1) The Handstamp. What is the genuine handstamp made of? Wood, metal or rubber? If you can work this out, you can also work out what a genuine strike of the handstamp is likely to look like. Quite often, forgers will use the wrong material to make their own handstamps - say, rubber instead of wood. And it is then possible to say that something is a Forgery because you can see that it is made from a rubber handstamp not a wooden one. You don't have to look more closely.

(2) The Ink Pad. In general, for any one handstamp only one or a few ink pads will be used by the post office clerk. If they are re-inked, they will be re-inked from a limited supply of bottles. Forgers producing small batches are likely to use just one ink pad and one bottle - and, in many cases, it is immediately recognisable that the ink they have bought from the local shop is just plain WRONG. You don't have to look more closely.

(3) The Basic Stamp. Remarkably often, forgers use the wrong basic stamp - maybe a forgery or a reprint or a later printing of a stamp which was used to make the original overprints. If the overprint can be dated to 1918 and the stamp was not printed in such-and-such a shade until 1920, then you know you a re looking at a forgery if the stamp is the 1920 version.

Starting this way reduces the number of stamps you have to look at closely - most Forgeries can be dismissed at a glance.

The real art needed to assess the few that can't is to find features of the genuine handstamp which tend to show however the clerk inks the handstamp and however he or she applies it. For this purpose, it is really helpful to have a large multiple showing the same overprint. For example only, suppose that the handstamp is the number and value  "100 r". You may find that however much the strikes differ, the gap between the "1" and the "0" and the gap between the "0" and the second "0" remains the same - when you allow for the slight differences between heavily inked and lightly inked strikes. You may also find curious things like this: maybe a tiny part of the second "0" almost never seems to print whatever the way the handstamp is struck. There is clearly some small defect in the handstamp - an area which is a millimetre below the level of the rest of the handstamp and which only fills up and shows when the handstamp is very heavily inked or struck.

And so it goes ... For the "100 r" Armenain Dashnak overprint on Russian stamps, Stefan Berger tells me he uses a 16 Features Test for the most difficult cases....

1920 Armenian Overprints on Romanov Stamps

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Dashnak Armenian overprints on Imperial Russian Romanov stamps are always philatelically-inspired and very often forged. On two values - the 4 kopeck and the 10 / 7 kopeck - genuine overprints are quite common and they can be found in multiples. Above, for example, is part of a complete sheet of 100 (minus one stamp ...) in the Peter Ashford collection which is surcharged with the 5 rouble (Type 3) overprint. In the bottom left corner you can see the ink signature of Kaushavili, an early dealer in this material - he sold to Agathon Fabergé, notably -  and whose signature is a good guarantee of authenticity.

It seems clear that the 4 kopeck and 10 / 7 kopeck stamps were still in the stocks of the Armenian post office in 1920, probably several thousand of each value, in sheets. But it is doubtful that any other values were held in anything but part sheets - and for some values I think that overprinted copies were brought to the post office in Yerevan by collectors/ dealers for surcharging. Genuine copies of surcharges on these other values of the Romanov stamps are extremely rare and forgeries are much more common.

The chalk paper of low value Romanovs and the recess printing of the high values are both unsuitable for surcharging by hand. Weak and smudged prints on the 4 kopeck and 10 / 7 kopeck are common. This makes expertising more difficult.

Recently, for the first time, I obtained a 100r surcharge on a 5 rouble Romanov. I show it below grouped with a block of three 10 rouble stamps also surcharged 100 roubles and, once again, from the Ashford collection.

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I think the overprint on the 5 rouble Romanov is genuine - the characteristic features one looks for are there. The ink seems a bit denser but that may be deliberate - it makes the overprint on a dark background a bit clearer. But I will want Stefan Berger's Opinion before I am willing to sell this stamp as genuine. The stamps is signed, twice, ECONOMIST, and it has the house mark RJC of Dr Ceresa.

Added 29 September 2014: Here is Stefan Berger's Opinion:

More About Armenia 1920 Overprints - Combined Surcharges

Emptying one of my stockbooks which did not sell in a recent auction, I pulled out all my working notes on the 1920 Combined Surcharges - the ones which add a rouble surcharge to a framed or unframed Z overprint. These notes were mostly written when I acquired the Tchilingirian - Ceresa holding of these stamps, probably 1000 + stamps at the time, and then added to when I acquired material from Serebrakian and other sources.

Here are some of my observations:

(1) I have never seen genuine combined surcharges on any of the following stamps though some are listed in catalogues:

Arms stamps, perforated: 1,2,3,5,7,10,14 and 70 kop
Arms stamps, Imperforate: 4,10,15,20,25,35,50 kop 7 and 10 rouble
Postal Savings, War Charities and Romanovs: all values except the 4 kop Romanov which can be found with combined surcharges (though it's rare)

Since these claims allow falsification I should be pleased to receive scans of stamps which require that a stamp should be taken off my "Does Not Exist" list

(2) Some rouble overprints were applied to sheets with authenticating cancellations applied at the time of the original Z overprinting. So it is possible to find combined surcharges with cancellations dated in the first half of 1920 - these cancellations relate to the Z overprint only

(3) Melik-Pachaev was able to get some stamps overprinted with both the Z and the rouble value at the same time or with the Z applied to stamps which already had rouble surcharges. See the image below where the Z is over the 100 rouble surcharge in the left hand block 4 with part ERIVAN "k" cancel. The Z in such Melik-Pachaev varieties is always (I think) type E18:

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(4) Combined surcharges with framed Z are much, much scarcer than with unframed Z - this makes sense if the post office in Erivan was overprinting remainders of earlier stocks. Michel valuations do not recognise this difference - perhaps only 1 in 10 combined surcharges are with framed Z. In addition, fewer values can be found with the framed Z. At its most extensive, my stock included only the following values with framed Z;

Arms perforated: 10/7, 15, 20, 25, 35, 50 kop
Arms Imperforate: 2 kop, 1, 3.50 and 5 rouble

Again this list could be expanded if anyone can scan genuine examples of other values.

(4) Though the 1, 3, 5  overprints can be found in violet occasionally (and rarely for the 10 rouble), no combined overprints show the rouble surcharge in violet, though the Z's are found in both violet and black.

(5) Despite all the philatelic manipulation around this issue:

     IF the stamp has a rouble face value, THEN the rouble overprint will be 50 or 100 roubles (never lower)

Armenia 1920, 10 rouble on 35 kopeck: The Old Jokes are the Best Jokes

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One morning, twenty years ago, I woke up to find myself a Deutschmark millionaire.

The editors at Michel had completely re-written the catalogue pages for Armenia. They had taken the 1978 book by Zakiyan and Saltikov and given their own listing a new and excellent structure, only unsatisfactory at the end where they ran out of space and compressed the listing of the 1923 overprints on the Yerevan pictorial set.

In addition, they had re-priced everything, for the most part intelligently - after all, Michel is a catalogue in a quite different league to Scott or Yvert where you don't expect any knowledge of the subject to be on display.

But they had made one big mistake. Zakiyan and Saltikov published (page 99 of their book) a Yerevan document prepared by the new Bolshevik administration in 1921, listing quantities of Dashnak stamps remaining in the post office - some numbers very large, some very small. The Bolsheviks located over half a million copies of the 5 rouble on 10 kopeck but - apparently - only 85 copies of the 10 rouble on 35 kopeck.

But Michel thought this was a list of numbers issued, not numbers remaining. Big mistake.

As a result some common stamps, notably the 10 rouble on 35 kopeck surcharge, appeared with fantastic never-before-seen valuations: 1500 DM and even more (3500 DM) when the 10r was applied over an existing framed or unframed Z.

In this way I became a Deutschmark millionaire. I had hundreds of these stamps then and I still have dozens (see the selection above).

Twenty years on, sellers regularly fall into the trap Michel has created and offer these common stamps as rarities - look at ebay or delcampe or Philasearch and you are almost certain to find one.

In reality, the 10 rouble on 35 kopeck perforated should probably retail for 10 - 15 € according to condition and when combined with an unframed Z maybe 50 - 75 €. With a framed Z it is genuinely scarce (as are all rouble overprints combined with framed Z) and it should probably retail at 150 € but could sensibly be offered as a single Lot in a specialist auction, something which is not true of the regular 10r or the 10r over unframed Z. At 150 € it would be cheap relative to its scarcity - but Armenian philately is repeatedly "spoilt" as a collecting area by the constant stream of new forgeries and the equally constant stream of catalogue errors, most recently in the ARTAR handbook. Both have the effect of making buyers cautious.

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Armenian Forgeries

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It's hard to get excited about forgeries of Dashnak Armenian stamps. They were produced on an industrial scale - and no doubt there is someone still producing them. You don't need more than kindergarten skills.

Many forgeries were probably produced by people who did not possess genuine examples and had only seen pictures. Some forgeries were produced by people copying forgeries which they may have thought to be genuine examples - for Dashnak overprints they may have put their trust in the illustrations of Yvert et Tellier, all of which are (or were - I last looked a few years ago) copied from forgeries.  Over the decades, Yvert probably did more harm to Armenian philately than any other catalogue. 

The forger who produced the small multiples shown above had almost certainly seen genuine stamps since he (it's normally he) has copied a feature you see on genuine sheets - the post office clerk testing out his (then it was always his) handstamp in the sheet margin. As forgeries, these are consequently Above Average.

The 10r on 25 kopeck imperforate forgery is interesting. This is a stamp which I think exists in genuine state, but it's rare - the 25 kop was not a common stamp imperforate and it would probably only have reached Armenia in the first Bolshevik period (end 1920 - beginning 1921) and would then have been used by Melik-Pachaev to produce scarce philatelic varieties in the second Dashnak period of 1921. 

Though basic stamps and Dashnak overprints are combined in a myriad of ways, many of the permutations the inspired work of dealers and speculators, there is one area where some kind of discipline was maintained. This is the case for high value overprints (50 rouble and 100 rouble) on rouble value basic stamps. The 50 r overprint was normally applied to the 1 rouble stamp and the 100 rouble overprint to the other high value stamps (3r 50, 5r, 7r, 10r). Though genuine 100r overprints can be found on the 1 rouble, 50 rouble overprints do not appear to exist on the higher value stamps. Some 5r stamps exist overprinted 25r - and then corrected to 100r. 

So it appears that either a ruling by the post office or the economics of the situation meant that no one got hold of surcharges below 100r on stamps above 1 rouble It's curious but seems to be true. 

But spaces for lower value surcharges on higher value stamps found their way into old French album pages and forgers obliged with stamps to fit. Or vice versa: the album pages were designed for the forgeries. Below I show an old album page, given to me at the Paris Salon d'Automne with spaces for 50 r surcharges on imperforate 3r50 and 5r stamps (#73, 74). And I also show a block of 50r on 5r forgeries from an old dealer's stock which I bought at auction many years ago in Paris's rue Druout stamp trade district. I think it's a chicken and egg situation: did the album page come first or the forgery?

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Armenia 1919 - 21 Dashnak overprinted stamps

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Armenia's 1919 - 21 Dashnak overprints are all made with single handstamps, the Z handstamps made of rubber and the rouble handstamps made of metal. Tens of thousands of stamps were overprinted, probably most of them sold to people emigrating. There was no point taking out Armenian currency - Armenia was in ruins, was not exporting anything and had no tourist trade - but stamps were a saleable commodity abroad. Domestic postal services were very restricted and outside Armenia some mail went to Georgia but beyond that almost nothing.

There are several types of ink used and these affect the look of the overprints. This is particularly the case for the metal rouble handstamps. 

Look at the top two block of six. Both have genuine overprints from the same handstamp, but one is made using a "dry" ink and the other with a "watery" (diluted) ink. The effect of the diluted ink is to eliminate the fine detail of the Monogram above the "10r" and to make the "0" in the "10r" appear more round. But if you put these overprints on top of each other, they match very well - the overall dimensions remain the same.

At the end of the Dashnak period, rouble surcharges were added to stocks of stamps with existing Z overprints. The bottom left block of 4 shows "10" added in black over a small Z in grey ink so the overall effect is not too bad. But on the right, I show a block of 4 where the Monogram above the "10r" has been obscured (Dr Ceresa suggests with a paper strip) so that the Z can still be seen. 

Importantly, the Monogram has not been removed from the 10r handstamp to create a new type: if you look at the stamp in position 1 in this block of 4, you can see traces of the Monogram below the Z. This effect is common on these stamps - though the stamps themselves are scarce or rare.

Armenia: Postally Used Dashnak Stamps 1919-21

Postally Used Dashnak Stamps? Mission Almost Impossible.

Over the past twenty years, I have handled thousands of Dashnak stamps - and maybe six commercial or philatelic covers and cards, which can only be obtained as expensive single item Lots in auction.

At one point, it occurred to me to look at my stamps and take out any that looked postally used as opposed to Cancelled to Order (Favour cancelled).

CTO stamps normally have neat, full cancels "socked on the nose" or they have neat quarter cancels. Only four places seem to have cancelled to order: Alexandropol, Erivan [ maybe 90% of the total], Elenovka and Katarsky Zavod (the copper mines at Giryusy). The last two places favour cancelled only a tiny number of stamps. Most CTO stamps will have gum but, of course, this can be washed off and sometimes is.

From my stocks, I picked out maybe thirty stamps. A few were on pieces and one had a violet Censor cachet across it. These I sold. The rest are shown above.

Given the Tariffs at this period, you would expect to find mainly rouble value stamps or stamps with rouble surcharges. However, early on there was a 60 kopeck tariff and a 1 rouble 20 tariff. Since there is no 60 kopeck Imperial stamp, then a 50 Kopeck + 10 kopeck would have been an efficient two stamp way of reaching 60 kopecks [ 25 + 35 is also possible but no other combination]. For 1 rouble 20, 1 rouble + 20 kopeck is one of two ways of obtaining that rate; the other is to use two 1 kopeck stamps with 60k Armenian overprints. [At Katarsky Zavod the local 1 r 20 overprint on 1 kopeck would have also served].

This reasoning leaves some puzzles in relation to the stamps shown above which include a 2 kopeck and 3 kopeck imperforate with unframed Z. These stamps could have been soaked from philatelic covers, like those sent by Souren Serebrakian to his brother in Tiflis. These are normally correctly franked, but with a variety of low value adhesives.

I also have some doubts about the 3r on 3 kopeck and 5r on 2 kopeck imperforate shown in the top row on the right. These have ERIVAN "k" cancellations which are associated with the speculative activity of Paul Melik - Pacher / Pachaev / Pachaian about which I have Blogged before. It's possible that these two stamps are also soaked from philatelic covers.

This perhaps shows that though they exist postally used Dashnak stamps are needles in haystacks or hen's teeth.

Souren Serebrakian Specials: Armenian Dashnak stamps

A few Blogs ago, I wrote about the "Constantinople Group" and included Souren Serebrakian (1900 - 1990).

Though born in Tiflis, Souren Serebrakian found himself in Yerevan in 1920 where he put together a stock of Dashnak Armenian overprints which lasted him a lifetime. His philatelic activity began in February or March and came to an end in August or September, when he made his way out of the Caucasus.

I started collecting and dealing in Armenia just after his death and acquired a lot of material from Serebrakian's widow in New York who continued trading until her own death (in 1997). I remember her as a lively and interesting person. Eventually, all the remaining Armenia stock was auctioned at Cherrystone.

I always kept the photocopies of stocksheets which Mrs Serebrakian used to send me - now I have passed them to Stefan Berger to assist his work as an Expertiser for classic Armenian stamps.

I was once told (I think by Dr Ceresa) that Souren Serebrakian was the nephew of a post office official in Yerevan. This may explain why he was able to obtain all kinds of "counter surcharges" to enhance his stock, notably overprints on Imperial stamps which were not being officially overprinted. Some of these stamps he put on postcards which he sent to his brother in Tiflis (they arrived).

Maybe he was also allowed behind the counter to use the handstamps himself and to fool around making small varieties. The illustration above shows two "Serebrakian Specials", created on stamps which were being officially and regularly overprinted in large quantities.(In the catalogue, they are Michel 8 and 12, with modest valuations).

In the first case, he has angled the large framed Z handstamp, pressing down on the right hand frame. The handstamp has also been inverted. I show a pair of normal overprints, with the framed Z the right way up, for comparison.

In the second case, he has used a medium framed Z handstamp (probably E4) to create smudged overprints placed in different positions on the stamps. I don't have a regular E4 for comparison. Note that all the 35 kop stamps are in the same shade - they could even be from the same sheet (see how the right hand side perfs touch the frame line of the design)

In both cases, it is only when you have a few copies of the Specials that you can really see that you are dealing with a deliberately created small variety. Probably each Special was created in small quantities: you did one sheet using one trick, then the next sheet using another trick. Occasionally, Serebrakian signed these varieties. In later life he used a small boxed SER - and as far as I can tell, he usually reserved this for stamps which he knew to be scarce (like framed Z on 1 kop perforated or 7 kop perforated). None of the stamps shown above have this boxed signature.

These little varieties are collectible as part of the philatelic history of Dashnak Armenia. What are they worth? In many cases, not very much. I suppose they merit a premium of about 100% on the basic stamp value, so in the example above 10 to 15 €uro each. But I think yo will agree with me, they do look more interesting when shown as a small group

Postscript 8 May: In his Comment (see below) Vasilis asks the interesting question, How do I know the overprints on 35 kopeck are original, from genuine handstamps.

It's true that I assumed that because they were from Serebrakian stock they must be OK. In my experience, even after 70 years the stock was remarkably free of contamination by forgeries. But there are two other things to consider:

(1) the ink is within the range of those found at this time. It looks to me like someone has added some oil or even some water to the ink pad to produce the smudged effect, but it is still ink in the right ball park;

(2) there is a family of these smudged / unclear overprints with some of them showing more clearly the outlines of the handstamp used. I have picked some from my stockbook and show them below - not all of these are from the same handstamp (some are medium and some are Large).

To get a better answer, we need to ask Tobias Huylmans to use his microscope again (see his recent Blog) or Stefan Berger to join the discussion ....  Postscript 20 April 2013: Tobias has looked at the stamps, including the 35 kopeck smudged overprints, and concludes that the ink is the same type on all stamps