Award For The Most Circles? (Austria)

This early 20th century Austrian stamp cancelled in Vienna has come down with a bad case of circular cds - 'c disease' as experienced philatelists refer to it.

One wonders whether there was an award for the cancel whose design featured the most concentric circles!

I wonder what the complete cancel looked like.



Happy New Year everybody!!

That is actually rather nice.

Happy New Year!

Possibly two cancels, (both machine cancels?) placed one over the other? The wavey bars of the obliterator (killler) portion forming the upper concentric rings?

The postal worker was singing 'She loves me, ya, ya yaaaa' when he cancelled this Beatles souvenir sheet from Great Britain:

I don't think they're wavy bars from a machine cancel - I think they're actually circles!

I'm hoping someone who has seen something along the same lines will be able to tell us.

Re the Beatles' souvenir sheet - that looks bloody awful! Why, oh why?

A sordid love triangle no doubt, me , her, the Beatles. The Beatles won.

I think if the Austria stamp was to have multiple circular cancels the concentric rings wouldn't be concentric as they would start to overlap one upon another, all of them being of the same diameter. The only way for that cancel to happen is to have a wavey-lined killer cancel or larger and larger circular cancels to have larger and larger diameters.

It looks great though. A most rare occurrence, no doubt of that.

This is something I haven't seen from Austria before.

What I am wondering though is, is it possible that it was machine cancelled as well as having a CDS one applied to it as well??

Just a guess really :(

Chimo

Bujutsu

Bujutsu, but what are the chances that they would be perfectly in alignment?

It wouldn't have to be a machine cancel. Manual roller cancels were very common in those days and later.

Here is an example of a manual roller cancel of CDS + wavy lines from Bhopal, in 1945. The waves are much flatter, but I think the same principle probably holds with the Austrian cancel: wavy lines of some sort.



(on SG O348c)

Poosibly, but the scan is hard to accurately state that they are in perfect alignment to the CDS portion. I also see that there is a wide gap between the CDS (Circular Date Stamp) and the start (first set of rings).

Is it possible for a larger picture?

Chimo

Bujutsu

It's also possible that there are two cancellations: a roller cancel across the top, and a Vienna CDS below. If the Sehore CDS on my cover had been placed a bit more to the right, you would have achieved the same effect.

It's not a case of two cancellations that happen, by coincidence, to create a striking impression.

On both sides, left and right, there is exactly 5.5 mm between the outer circle of the cds and the first set of rings.

The exact same distance is maintained the whole way along.

What's more, they are not wavy lines, but part circles. The Bhopal cover shows all too well what wavy line cancels look like.

This is a single cancellation, albeit a very unusual one.

I just did some research and found this on ebay Austria:



I think this second example of the same cancel shows that there really was an Austrian cancel with loadsa rings!

And this is the listing I got it from:

http://cgi.ebay.at/Osterreich-3-Bri...em336393715e

As far as I know, it is a single canceling device. They are neither wavy lines nor concentric circles, but arcs. I think there are something like 11 arcs above and below, as well as a shorter arc at each corner. The stamps shown above are too small to show the entire cancel. They were applied to stamps affixed to parcel cards. I do not know if they were applied to stamps affixed to covers/packages.

I don't collect covers and don't specialize in cancels, so read my post with several grains of salt.

Well, looking at your last pic, I see there are 13 arcs below main CDS. So either my memory is very faulty, I'm not good at counting, or both!!

Since I was wrong about the number of arcs, I may also be wrong about the other things. Maybe they are complete circles after all, and the examples that I remember seeing before were not complete. However, I am pretty certain it is one single giant cancel and that it was at least used to cancel stamps on parcel cards.

my argument, but this would only be true if the same circular cancel was used to make all the arcs.

The second example of a stamp with similar cancel throws that feeble option out with the bath water.

Excellent research, by the way, something I didn't do, just guessing to the best of my knowledge, which can be a dangerous thing to do.

Your example almost nullifies the theories of multiple cancels over-lapping one on over the other. Still could happen on some odd occurrence or occasion, perhaps by the same clerk who was doing it on a whim or some such. Highly unlikely now, with two examples though, I would think.

Below are examples from delcampe.net, the sellers name being part of the picture, showing regular circular bridge (?) cancels and roller cancels of the same time period:







Although inconclusive for want of more and a full entirety of examples, they show that the usual wavy lines would not be of the same spacing as those on the stamps shown but also the existing cancels on the stamps first posted are not showing enough of the centers of the cancels to determine whether they are of the same bridge cancel type.

My new and improved theory is that this may be some sort of either event cancel, made for a special occasion in Vienna or some kind of cancel made for a special branch or section. Theories still.

Needed for conclusive evidence most likely is a full usage on cover or parcel which through my limited searching so far I have not found.

Someone with a specialized Austria catalogue would be the ideal person to have jump in here and solve the riddle.