Identify 3 Stamps

Barb, I see I still haven't responded to your questions about killers. I'm sorry. I've only just picked myself up from the floor again. The thought of Rod222 and his Travancore always reduces me to fits of hysterics. (I do hope he'll stop it. It alarms the cat when I have these attacks.)

Cancellations, and their values, are a vast field. Rodney gets all hot and bothered over Travancore killers with village post office numbers in the centres. Me? I can take 'em or leave 'em. Many collectors dislike killers because they do their job too thoroughly, and completely deface the stamp. Unless the killer is very rare, or special for some other reason, it's likely to have little or no value at all. If you can find them on cover, and not defacing the stamp too badly (as in the case of that Jammu & Kashmir/India postcard), they do little harm, but little positive good either.

Where to learn about them? The postmark experts for each country that used them, I'm afraid. I don't know of a single source of all wisdom on the subject. I doubt there is one. I can tell you a little about killers from places like Orchha



and Nawanagar



that you wouldn't want to know about, but nothing about places you would want to know about. Sorry!

Rodney, vulgar and gaudy is always vulgar and gaudy, in any sense

Well answered on the killers, I like that.
The trouble with killers, is that they have their good points
but it depends on the circumstance at which you view them.
On cover, they look nice, and they leave usually, a nice clear
legible CDS.

I was rather tickled to see your comment on
vulgar and gaudy just below that Nawanagar example.
very fitting.
Vulgar and gaudy sometimes comes with a great personality.


Off cover, on singleton stamps killers are awful, and just
about make the stamp worthless.

Like them or loathe them, they still are part of
the history of philately, and we study that history
with its faults and joys.

At least we can agree that killers have their place in the stamp story, Rod

Best seen on cover, where they are an essential part of a story, of course, rather than on loose stamps, where their story is lost.

This ¼ Anna stamp of Poonch would be a pretty ordinary thing off its postcard:



But still attached, the box of boxes Poonch killer is part of the story of how this postcard travelled from what is now the Indian side of the de facto border in Kashmir, through the Western reaches of the Himalayas to Kahuta (now in Pakistan, and the centre of Pakistani nuclear research) and down to Gujar Khan, near Rawalpindi, and also in Pakistan these days.

Oommmmmmm......

Do, please, spare my blushes, Barb