More Difficult Local Tridents: Nova Pryluka

Suppose you find what you think is a Trident of Nova Pryluka. It is not signed. How do you find out if it really is a Trident of Nova Pryluka?

At the moment, there is no recognised Expert for Ukraine Local Tridents so you can't just pay someone to tell you.

You can Google "Nova Pryluka" and you will get images of stamps with very good provenance.

You can look at Plate CDXLV in Dr Ceresa's 1987 publication on the Special Trident Issues. This is what I did and I reproduce the page above. At the bottom he writes, "Examples and photographs ex the Dr R. Seichter Collection". Then I looked back at what I had just acquired from the Philipp Schmidt collection, shown in the first illustration above. Ah...

I have
(1) a copy of the photograph shown top right in Ceresa.
(2) the actual 1 rouble imperforate shown top left in Ceresa
(3) the actual used 10 kopeck shown on a small piece of white backing paper middle of the third row
(4) the actual used 20 /14 kopeck  shown bottom left

But notice: the "Seichter" page in Ceresa is a collage. The 1 rouble perforated stamp in the photo at the top is also there in reality as the stamp bottom right. And it looks like a fake. It has what looks like a PETROGRAD 1 EXSP cancellation. The enlarged 10 kopeck stamp at middle left is a photograph.

This collage, in my opinion, shows stamps which Seichter believed to be Tridents of Nova Pryluka and stamps he believed to be forgeries or doubtful. Ceresa's page is not one from which we can easily expertise this Trident.

In 1960, Seichter gave a lecture to the Berliner Philatelisten Klub, "Ukraine: Fälschung oder unbekannte Typen? Kritische Betrachtungen über Lokalausgaben 1918 /20". Here he looks critically at (mostly) mint stamps appearing on the market with Beresno or Tchernigow II Tridents.

It is my belief that Seichter worked with Schmidt on this problem of doubtful Local Tridents. Schmidt's copy of the photograph of nine stamps is dated on the back "1958". And the six used Schmidt stamps provided Seichter with expertising material for problematic overprints of the Nova Pryluka Trident, such as those shown in the photograph. Each of the six stamps at the top were mounted on small pieces of paper. I think the handwriting may be Schmidt's rather than Seichter's but each piece of paper is signed SEICHTER BPP. The stamps themselves are not signed.

The six used stamps I found in Schmidt have a good case to be regarded as authentic. All are on values listed by Seichter and Bulat. The two 1 rouble value stamps have very good strikes of NOVAYAR PRILUKA KIEV cancels with October 1918 cancels. If these stamps are not genuine Tridents of Nova Pryluka, then none are.

Then 15 kopeck perforate has a cancel which begins "NO .." and the other stamps will probably yield to further study. And Dr Seichter signed a piece of paper attached to each stamp - one of those pieces of paper can be seen on the Ceresa page.

In contrast, look at the two stamps at the bottom, the 1 kopeck and the 5 kopeck imperforate. These are ex-Lindenmeyer (if I recall correctly) and Ron Zelonka told me they were both fakes. The 1 kopeck perforated is listed by Chuchin 1926 (though not by Seichter or Bulat) and the Trident looks pretty good ... but it has an Odessa cancel. The 5 kopeck imperforate is a listed value for Nova Pryluka BUT here it has a fragment of a 1922 cancel, which kills any idea that it might be genuine just as the PETROGRAD cancel killed the 1 rouble perforated.

I am sorry this is a long and boring Blog. What it shows, I hope, is that if you want to collect the more difficult Local Tridents you have to be willing to do lots of detective work  - scrutinise every stamp. Not only that, scrutinise the published work.

Added February 2020: Most of my Ukraine-related Blog posts are now available in full colour book form. To find out more follow the link:

http://www.armeniazemstvo.com/2020/02/just-published-trevor-pateman.html

Ukraine Local Trident Overprints

Like RSFSR Postmaster Provisional revaluation of 1920, locally produced Ukraine Trident overprints - which are also Postmaster Provisionals - are difficult to collect. But less difficult than is sometimes imagined.

First of all, think about the situation which generated legitimate local tridents. Official Trident overprints came into use late in August 1918. In September, the use of unoverprinted stamps was tolerated - and mixed frankings are quite common. Only from the beginning of October were unoverprinted stamps invalid.

So Postmasters had a problem only if they found themselves without (enough) Trident stamps at the beginning of October. They could put in requests for supplies and, eventually no doubt, they would get them.  Meanwhile, they might decide to improvise their own local Tridents.

In other words, there is no reason to expect to find a local Trident used before October 1918 and probably not much reason to expect to see them in use after say January 1919.

Producing the Tridents would have been extra work for a local post office, so it is likely that most local tridents were produced in small batches. When their use came to an end, it is unlikely that there were many mint remainders which could be called in by regional or central authorities. Of course, they could ask for a new batch to be produced ( for onward transmission to philatelic agencies) or they could ask for the handstamp and then produce their own Reprints. Likewise, if philatelists turned up quickly enough at some out-of-the-way post office they might be able to get a supply of mint stamps - this clearly happened in some cases.

Either way, when starting a collection of local Tridents it makes sense to avoid mint stamps since they will include Reprints, other philatelic productions and - of course - forgeries.

When Dr Seichter was working on Local Trident overprints he had four problems to deal with.  First, forgeries  produced by Captain Schramschenko (really Scamschenko) whose handstamps had not yet been discovered and prints taken from them published. Second, forgeries produced in the Soviet Union and authenticated with a large Soviet guarantee mark which Alexander Epstein has since shown to be a forgery. Dr Seichter seems not to have known this. Third, the lack of accurate drawings and illustrations of the Tridents. Fourth, the general lack of material.

The first two problems no longer exist. We can identify these forgeries quite easily. The third problem does remain. The catalogues in general use are not very helpful. We really need to see colour images with enlargements.

As for the fourth problem, the solution is to make a start with the commoner local Tridents. I exclude Chernihiv (Tchernigov) and Zhitomir since these were productions of regional post and telegraph administrations (as Alexander Epstein has shown).

Back in 1926, C Svenson in his Ukraina-Handbuch, II Teil  picked out the tridents of Ovruch and Sarny as both clearly legitimate and reasonably common issues (page 33). This remains true. Svenson even gives two prices for Ovruch 50 kopeck stamps: used (10 Marks) and used on complete postal Formular (15 Marks). Well, those Formulars are no longer that common in relation to the stamps but the stamps can be found. The illustration to this Blog shows my complete holding for Ovruch. The stamps are all Bulat 2465, catalogued at $55 used and unpriced for mint. Cancellations are dated October and November 1918. The Parcel Card fragment has the same style of punch hole as the complete Formular so probably was also sent to Kharkiv. A stamp has been harvested from the fragment to provide a copy of a used stamp - presumably an Ovruch Trident. This is characteristic of the way the Formulars were treated when first released in the 1920s and 1930s. All five loose stamps are signed (3 Dr Seichter, 2 UPV)

With Ovruch one is really only dealing with one stamp and one cancellation and nothing in the holding I am illustrating here is doubtful. In contrast, Sarny stamps were used at other offices and there are more values to collect. There are also mint Reprints and lots of forgeries, mint and used.

By the way, it is a good habit to try to find the cancellations used by local Trident post offices but on more common stamps, like General Issue (Shagiv) stamps. This is a good way of double checking authenticity.

The more difficult local trident issues are, of course, more difficult and I will write about this in my next Blog.

Added February 2020: Most of my Ukraine-related Blog posts are now available in full colour book form. To find out more follow the link:

http://www.armeniazemstvo.com/2020/02/just-published-trevor-pateman.html

Denikin stamps with local perforations

Back on 6 August, I blogged about a Denikin stamp with Postmaster Provisional perforations. To my surprise, I find a few similar items in the Civil War part of the Schmidt Collection, about which I blogged yesterday. Here are five loose stamps (two were once a pair) with a local perforation - this is not the "regular" Denikin perforation. They are all the same type and the legible cancellations read ROSTOV NA DON 25 10 19.

Of course, it would be much better to have these on cover or Formular. But you can see how a demand may have built up from such improvisations to have Denikin stamps perforated officially at source.

The stamps were in an old Auswahlheft (Approval Book) and were not distinguished, by price or otherwise, from the normal stamps around them. We are lucky that the perforations were not cut off to make the stamps look nicer - this is what sometimes happens to these messy local perforations.

Forgotten Ukraine Trident collections

Just as most novels are forgotten and we remember only the novels of the great writers, so most collections are forgotten and we remember only the names of the great collectors.

 But the forgotten novels and the forgotten collections provided an important context for the work of the major novelists and collectors.

They learnt from them and they provided inspiration for them.

 Ukraine trident collecting was a serious area of philatelic activity from 1918 until (say) the 1950s. As late as 1960, the Ukraine - Philatelisten - Verband (U.P.V.)in Germany had 84 members with Oskar Peters and Rudolf Seichter as Honorary members and such "ordinary" members as Gustav Seefeldner, Waldemar Pohl, Julian Maksymczuk, Eugene Kotyk, Cecil Roberts, Simon Tchilingirian, and John Bulat.

 Recently, the collection of another UPV member from that period, Philipp Schmidt, re-appeared after maybe thirty years in storage and was sold at auction by Christian Arbeiter in Bamberg. Schmidt was born in 1900, and became an engineer living in Munich.

He was collecting Trident overprints at least as far back as 1943 - see how he writes to Dr Seichter to ask about the Kyiv I overprint in black on the 10 rouble imperforate (Bulat 49a). Dr Seichter replies on the back of the half sheet of paper (this was war-time!).

 Collections of the "second rank" like those of Schmidt provide useful information about what was available to someone whose collection would never equal that of Dr Seichter but was nonetheless a serious collector. They also sometimes contain surprises - things which even Dr Seichter might have been pleased to have.

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Postscript 1 October 2012: I discover I have an envelope (without contents) sent from Dr Seichter in Soltau to Philipp Schmidt in Munich postmarked 25 1 37, so I assume Schmidt had already begun collecting Ukraine at this date - and [ added 17 April 2015] Michael Kuhn has now found this cover from Schmidt to Dr Seichter which takes their connection back to 1932 when (interestingly) Schmidt (an engineer) seems to have been working in Soviet Ukraine:

Added February 2020: Most of my Ukraine-related Blog posts are now available in full colour book form. To find out more follow the link:

http://www.armeniazemstvo.com/2020/02/just-published-trevor-pateman.html

Russia 1990s Inflation

Commercial covers can be more exotic than anything fabricated by philatelists. The three shown here must have involved an awful lot of work. If you think philatelists are obsessive, what about the guys who franked these covers?

601600 ALEXANDROV VLADIM.O[blast]. 16 04 93 to VÖRU [Estonia] 15 05 93 franked 1991 Reprints of 1984 Soviet 3 rouble definitives, 4 on the front and 30 on the back (= 102 roubles) + a possible but unlikely contribution from the 7 kopeck imprint and the unclear kopeck uprating beside it

432002 ULYANOVSK 08 04 93 to VÖRU 27 4 93 franked 44 x 900 kopeck cut-outs (totalling 396 roubles) from a Soviet-period franking machine. At this period, some offices modified their franking machines by scratching out "KOP" at the base and inserting "RUB".

The Winner at the top of this Blog:

390072 NOVOVORONEZH 05 03 92 to VILNIUS [Lithuania] 10 04 92 franked - as far as I can tell - with 148 x 10 kopeck stamps which are cancelled together with 2 x 1 kopeck stamps which may have been originally applied to uprate the postal stationery envelope and have probably been ignored - or which may have been silently revalued to 10 kopecks to complete what was intended as a 15 rouble franking.

Armenian Overprints on Turkish Fiscals?

In collections and accumulations of world-wide fiscals, you quite often find old stamps with Arabic inscriptions "overprinted" typographically in Armenian script.

These are in fact Ottoman Turkish newspaper tax stamps which were applied to the sheets of news - paper before printing took place. This can be seen on the example here of a complete 1887 newspaper which consists of four broadsheet sides of print on a single sheet of large news - paper

The newspaper is AREVELK published at Galata, Constantinople, by Han Noradounghian. It was founded as a daily newspaper in 1884 by Arpiar Arpiarian and was published continuously until 1915. It is probably the source of most of those fiscals found in old collections.

Katerynoslav Tridents: Work to Do?

Trident collectors will know that Katerynoslav Type I was (normally) applied in a horizontal handstamp holding five Tridents clichés, so that 20 impressions were required to overprint a sheet of 100 kopeck value stamps. But how many handstamps were there? And were they modified when a Trident fell out or deteriorated?

Bulat (page 46) illustrates just ONE handstamp of 5 but says that there were THREE different handstamps. Dr Seichter in a 1956 pamphlet says that "ungefähr 70 verschiedene Kombinationen" [about 70 different combinations] have been identified - not by him but (from the context) by C W Roberts. However, Seichter even in this specialised publication just about Katerynoslav illustrates just TWO variants: a "feiner Aufdruck" and a "grober Aufdruck" - a thin and a thick overprint, roughly as illustrated above from my holding of these Tridents.

Well, frankly, this is not impressive. These stamps are not rare even in multiples and it ought to be possible to produce a guide which gives us the same kind of information as we have for Kyiv II or Poltava I.

It may be that there were actually a small number of physically distinct handstamps but that individual clichés in the handstamp were frequently replaced due to them falling out or because of wear. In this way, THREE and SEVENTY might be brought closer together.

I am not going to do the work. If someone is interested, I have here an accumulation (ex Zelonka) of 22 complete sheets, representing 22 of the 26 values overprinted including the 35 kopeck perforated and imperforate. Some of the sheets are a bit toned. Anyway, the Bulat catalogue value is around $2870 for the basic stamps (no premium added for the multiples). I reckon 500 €uro a reasonable price for the Lot. And if a buyer succeeds in making progress on classifying the Handstamps, then he or she is invited to announce the results on this Blog to tell us how many Katerynoslav I handstamps there really are.... Get in touch if you are interested ( I may not reply before 112 September).