Imperial Russian Fiscals for Polish Cities

Agathon Fabergé accumulated a very large collection of Imperial Russian fiscals and it passed to his son Oleg who added to it. But it was never written up properly and passed to another Finnish collector (B E Saarinen I believe) who then disposed of it to another collector and a dealer/collector. I bought from both of them, purchases which were several years apart.

The collection included large quantities of scarce stamps - for example, hundreds of Baku Court Fiscal stamps. Nearly all of those now on the market are ex-Fabergé though most of them don't have any identifying pencil notes.

There was also a quantity of Imperial fiscals for the courts in Warsaw and Lublin - more of the Lublin than the Warsaw. Today I looked through what I now have left: 3 Warsaw and 15 Lublin and tried to see what I could learn from these remainders. I have never seen Court Fiscals from other Polish cities.

A key item proved to be this right marginal pair. It also has wide margins at the top and the bottom from which I conclude that the stamps were printed in multiples of  ? x 2. So you would expect all stamps to have at least one wide margin at the top or bottom. This is true of another 9 of my stamps but not true of just 3. However, it is common for clerks to trim imperforate stamps just as it is common for clerks to remove the selvedge of perforated stamps:

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Then I wondered if it was possible to plate these stamps - as it is for the very easy Baku fiscals - but I could not make any progress. However, looking at my Warsaw stamps I concluded that the background network is the same as that on the Lublin stamps - and so was printed from the same plate. The network is a bit complicated but is not perfectly symmetrical - you can see in several places what looks like a W with a crown over it. That means that stamps with inverted backgrounds could exist:

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I asked myself if the frame and value tablets were also from the same plate for both cities with the city name added separately. But on all my copies, the city name shows no variation in position with respect to the frame and value tablet - so I conclude that there were separate plates for the text - a hypothesis supported when you look at the value "30" on the Lublin plate and the Warsaw plate. The "30" of Warsaw is thicker than the "30" of Lublin. And not just that: underneath the "30" of Lublin is the word "KOP" which is absent from the Warsaw stamps of both 10 and 30 denominations ...

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Printing Method? Hmmm.... looking at the backs of the stamps, the outer frame line in solid colour could be typographic, laid down first to guide the printing of the backgrounds and the text. Both of those could be lithographic. But I am not confident about this - and it implies three passes to print the stamps: frame line, background network, text

Baku Court Revenue Stamps before 1917

I don't enjoy plating stamps, but I make an exception for Baku Court Fiscals. They were printed in vertical strips of six, like raffle [lottery] tickets - on the left was a counterfoil [receipt] and on the right the stamps. The stamps are always imperforate on the right side. The stamp in # 1 position is also imperforate at top and the stamp in position # 6 is also imperforate at the base. So, in fact, there are really only four stamps to plate :)

Complete strips do exist, but if you do not have them, you can still plate using overlapping smaller multiples. This is how I worked when I first acquired a stock of these stamps about 15 years ago - see an example of my working notes above showing how I used overlapping pairs as the basis.

In a 1996 article, Jack Moyes listed 13 different styles, all produced in the lottery ticket format, but only four of these are normally encountered - these are the ones shown at the top. In all cases, the counterfoils (the left hand parts) are rare - I have never handled a single example. Complete documents with these stamps are also rare which is the main reason why it is not easy to date the different types accurately. Cancellations are generally undated so little information is available that way. But with patience, it might be possible to make more progress.

At some point, it seems, someone clipped hundreds of these stamps from original documents and they ended up (inevitably!) in the collection of Agathon Fabergé. He passed them to his son Oleg, who did not do much work on them, and from Oleg they passed to the great collector of Finnish revenue stamps, B. E. Saarinen who died this year at the age of 90. He sold his Russian revenue collection many years ago and I was (eventually) one of the buyers for parts of it.

Reference:
Jack G Moyes, "Russia - A Classification of the Baku District Court Stamps", The Revenue Journal of Great Britain, vol VII, No 2, September 1996, pages 27 - 33