This Blog post assumes
you have read the previous Blog post.
In the period before
World War One, obtaining older fiscal stamps and documents from smaller cities
and towns was probably as difficult as finding stamps and covers from the more
distant Zemstvos and perhaps more difficult. The collector societies in St
Petersburg and Moscow eventually set up arrangements with many Zemstvos to
supply new issues, and the Zemstvos were often co-operative when they realised
that their stamps could yield a significant income. In consequence, they began
to issue stamps rather in the way that Liechtenstein or Monaco do today. But I
doubt that writing to distant courts asking for their stamps would do anything
other than create suspicion. To this day, the pre-1914 fiscals of small
administrations are very scarce, especially on document. So it was a nice
surprise to find in my London purchases the following item:
Click on Image to Magnify
I have seen the stamps
of Yaroslavl before but not on complete document. This one, dated 1878, and
folded for the illustration was obtained by Agathon Faberge in September 1913.
He got it from Göschiel [ not a supplier I have encountered before ] and paid
15 rubles [ pd – k – 20 IX 13 Göschiel:
I decode the “k” as “ kauft” meaning purchased rather than “k” as in kopeck.
See Hellman and Stone, Agathon Fabergé,
page 242 ].
It seems that B E Saarinen
picked out some of these provincial fiscals for re-mounting and I assume that the
simple exhibit page below is his work (further information welcome). I haven’t
seen the two listed stamps of Kolpino before. Agathon F got the top piece with
the red stamps from Karing in 1914 but no price is indicated. Agathon has also
worked out the date written across the stamps as 15 September 1898. There are
no notes on the back of the strip of blue stamps but I suspect they are also
ex-Faberge.
Click on Image to Magnify
Faberge was able to
acquire some court fee stamps in bulk, notably from Baku, where someone cut off
many hundreds of the locally-produced stamps from their original documents.
They ended up in Faberge’s hands and were eventually dispersed. The Faberges
did begin to study them, though the published plating study is due to Jack
Moyes. The stamps were printed like raffle tickets in strips of six. The counterpart to the left of the MAPKA part was a receipt KVITANTSIA. These are rare. There is one example in my new acquistions, and on the back Oleg F has written FOTO, suggesting that an article or book was contemplated on the lines of the Zemstvo book for which Oleg also wrote FOTO on the back of items.
Despite
having had a stock of these Baku stamps since the 1990s I had never seen a strip of
six until the London sale and now I have just one such strip, with no acquisition
note on the back
Click on Image to Magnify
More difficult than any
provincial revenue stamps are the tax banderoles and labels applied by the
Maria Feodorovna charities to packs of playing cards, over the production of
which they held a monopoly. People who played cards were wasters rather
than hoarders and simply did not think to keep the bands and labels for future
collectors. So it was an agreeable surprise to find in my London purchase a
complete but empty playing card packet.
Click on Image to Magnify
The blue front packet design
is less elaborate than the beautiful red and black design illustrated in John
Barefoot’s Russia Revenues catalogue
[Plate I ] and on this Blog on 13 January 2016, and does not look like the work of the state printing works. But
whereas the tax work is done by the later red and black design, the actual tax
work is done here by the black strips which seal the packet horizontally and
vertically and which are intact on the reverse of the pack. Like the blue
design they incorporate the image of a pelican feeding her young which is the
logo of the Maria Feodorovna charities. I illustrate these sealing strips on my Blog of 13 January 2016
