A Rarity from 1923 Georgia

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Most collectors have the experience of never seeing a stamp which is listed in the catalogue they are using - not a RRRR stamp but a stamp which might be catalogued at 1 or 10  or 20 or 100. Sometimes, the problem is simply a typographical error in the catalogue - it says 3 cents red but should say 5 cents red. Sometimes, it is because of some unreliable information the catalogue editor was given either by a collector or a speculator. This is why editors of the better catalogues insist on seeing any stamp before they list it.

Over the years, I have handled thousands of stamps of Georgia for the period 1919 - 1923. They are well-studied and not very complex, except for some of the handstamp surcharges. But I had never seen one particular stamp, listed in the main catalogues: the 1923 machine overprint with Soviet arms and numeral of value, 300 000 on 20 kopek Imperial Arms perforated, but the overprint in blue instead of black. I did look carefully - blue and black are sometimes hard to distinguish on a blue stamp and maybe my eyes aren’t so good now.  I never found a blue overprint.

Then last week I was viewing the Dr Hans Grigoleit collection of Transcaucasia and there it was. Not only the stamp but on cover. The stamp exists and is not some philatelic variety - here are two copies on a clearly commercial cover from Suram / Surami to Tiflis / Tbilisi with a manuscript Registration cachet and a Tiflis / Tbilisi receiver (Ashford type 15). The letter is addressed in Georgian script and both despatch and arrival cancels are in Georgian, but the registration cachet has been written in Cyrillic as SURAM - the Georgian name is Surami.

So if you don’t have the blue overprint variety in your collection, keep on looking. It exists. As for this cover, it will be included in the Heinrich Koehler auction of Dr Grigoleit’s collection in September 2019. (I am grateful to Heinrich Koehler for letting me preview it here)

To view Lots in the September 2019 Koehler auction, it is easiest to view by country at

https://www.philasearch.com/en/country_topic.html?set_anbieter=35&set_auktionnr=5207

Russian Brides

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I guess this Blog post is going to get a lot of hits ...

The card above is of interest in at least four ways.

For the Russian Tariff collector, it's a nice example of the RSFSR's  27 rouble foreign postcard rate, in force from June to October 1922, and paid for here by a combination of kopeck stamps revalued x 100 together with three one rouble stamps used at face value. So 5 + 5 + 14 + 1 + 1 + 1  = 27 . But the Tariff is not a particularly scarce one and on its own makes the card worth maybe 30 €

For the Russian Censorship collector, there is a Petrograd Three Triangle civilian censor in the middle of the card. But it's upside down and only a part strike, so you wouldn't choose it if you had the choice of a better one.

For the Russian Stamp collector, this is really interesting (and I didn't at first see it). Look at the one rouble stamps on an enlarged image. They are perforated well off-centre. More importantly, they are examples of the scarce post - revolutionary perforation 12.5 which all catalogues give a big premium on. I hate measuring perforations and rarely do but I have checked these all round and, yes, they are 12.5. Pity about the brown toning at the top. That said, I have absolutely no idea what this card is worth as an example of that perforation used on a regular item of mail. But examples must be scarce if the catalogues are right about the basic stamp.

For the social historian - and this is what I first noticed - the interest is in the addressee, Mrs L F Mead. She was the wife of Lieutenant Leonard Frank Mead (b 1898) who served with the Royal Flying Corps and then with the Royal Air Force in British-Occupied Batum. His letters home are well-known to collectors of British Batum. 

He also visited Tiflis and it was probably there that he met Nadia Archangelsky who became Mrs L F Mead. [See now the Postscript] The card is from her family who had by 1922 moved to Petrograd.

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Postscript added 25 November 2015: Here is an envelope sent within Tiflis by Leonard Mead (his initials bottom left) to Mlle. Archangelsky; the billet doux is no longer inside the envelope:

Added 22 March 2016: And here is a card from TIFLIS VOKSAL 13 12 24 addressed to the same Nadia Archangelsky but now Mrs Mead living in Reading, England. That the card was underfranked was noted in Tiflis and Postage Due was raised by London's Foreign Section:

Georgia 1921 "De Jure" overprints and the "Constantinople Group"

Here are two covers: both use pre-printed business envelopes of a member of the Rockling family in Tiflis, both are franked with genuine examples of "De Jure" overprints intended to mark the full recognition of Georgia by the League of Nations on 27 January 1921, both are addressed in the same hand and marked "Registered" in the same hand, to no obvious purpose since there are no Registration cachets or numbers. Both have identical cancellations:

- a TBILISI serial "ts" with a pattern of 4 dots on either side of the serial dated 21 2 21
- a TBILISI serial "z" with no dots either side of the serial and dated 22 2 21.

Now, the only real question of interest is this: were these covers favour cancelled at a Tbilisi post office counter, just before the Bolshevik capture of Tbilisi on 25 February, or not? And, if not, where were they cancelled.

Peter Ashford in his Georgia: Postal Cancellations 1918 - 1923 lists the first "ts" cancellation as genuine type, gives it the number Type 26A but says of it, "So far only seen dated 21.2.21 on philatelic covers bearing top values of "De Jure" issue, cancelled for friends of S.Rockling. Confirmation of other usage awaited" (page 68).

However, Ashford then lists the "z" cancellation as a Fake, a forgery (page 151) used by the 1920 - 21 "Constantinople" group of stamp dealers, collectors, printers and crooks - of which more in a moment. This "z" cancellation, says Ashford, was "used to 'cancel' a whole range of phantasies" (page 151)

In my opinion, it is more probable that either both these cancellations are genuine or that both are fake.

On the one side,these cancellations are well-made devices in a style very close to that of other Tbilisi cancellations. The ink pad used yields impressions which are similar in colour and so on to that of clearly genuine cancellations of the period.

Of course, it could be that they are genuine post-office made cancellers which, along with an ink pad, found their way to the other side of the post office counter and thence to a Forger's Den in Constantinople.

It could also be that they were made privately in Tbilisi for someone who knew he was going to (have to) leave and wanted them to take with him, to Constantinople.

Given their quality, it seems less likely that they were made in Constantinople.

Crucially, unless we can find examples of BOTH of them used on uninteresting mail before or after 21/22 2 21 it seems unlikely that they were at the post office counter in Tbilisi on JUST those two days. It seems more likely that they were never there and that, wherever they were made, they were only used in Constantinople to create what French dealers now like to call produits philatéliques.

I probably would not have put you through this analysis but for one thing: on the first cover illustrated above (blue stamps) on the right towards the bottom, is the house mark of ROMEKO PARIS.

Now Serge Romeko's original name was Rockling and these covers are on his family's business notepaper. As a Paris stamp dealer, Romeko was remarkably careful about applying his house mark. I have only once or twice seen it on a "bad" item. In adddition, I have many times seen sheets or blocks of stamps from Transcaucasia annotated in pencil by Romeko with the word "Bon" and his initials - it seems that he checked stuff coming into his stock and used this pencilled note to indicate that he was satisfied with the item. So I would be surprised if Romeko put his house mark on a fake, even one he had made himself as a younger man, en route to Paris from Tbilisi via Constantinople ...

Which brings me to the "Constantinople Group", the subject of my next Post.