Great Help For Sorting Kiloware

I was down to my last envelope of "I Don't Knows" which are the stamps I set aside to figure out where they belong LAST.

I had this stamp that looked like your regular run-of-the-mill Postage Due for Belgium, except that it had a Malmedy overprint. I was clueless on this one.



I grabbed the Official Stamp Collector's Bible by Stephen Datz. I turned to the Foreign Stamp Identifier chapter and looked up Malmedy. It said:




I flipped back a few pages and read this:




I won't tell you how many times I had to read that to figure out where I had to look in the Scott catalog to find the stamp.

I turned to German Occupation Stamps where Belgium is the first country listed as ever occupying Germany. The stamp is described as "Belgian Postage Due Stamps of 1919-20, Overprinted." The stamp is a Germany 1NJ8. The best surprise was that the 2006 catalog value was $11.50, a far cry from the minimum of $0.20.

This book also has a Cyrillic Alphabet Inscription identifier which is very helpful when identifying stamps from Serbia, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Montenegro, Macedonia, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, etc.

I bought my used copy on Amazon or ebay.

p.s. For all you purists out there, I know there is an accent over the "e" in Malmedy, but my keyboard doesn't have an accented "e."

~~ Mary-Jane ~~

An often overlooked feature of the Scott catalogs is the index at the back of each catalog.

In your example, look up Malmedy in the index. If the stamp is not in that volume, the index will tell you to see Volume 3. If you are already in Volume 3, the index will tell you page where the section containing Malmedy begins. Every once in a while, the page number will be incorrect because Scott didn't update the index page for that listing from the previous year; but in general, I've found the index to be a great "look here first" reference for the more obscure stamp issuing country/entity/authority.

khj,

I thought I'd found all the nooks and crannies (or crooks and nannies) of the Scott Catalogs but now I know another one, thanks to you!

Thunderous applause!

Nice cancel, nice stamp.

It's great when you find the answer after the catalogues make you 'jump through hoops'.
A tip if you want to use special characters such as accented or unlauts is shown on this link - http://tlt.its.psu.edu/suggestions/...codealt.html
You basically hold down the ALT key on your keyboard and enter the number using the keypad on the side (numlock must be on - most keyboards have a light to show this).
It is more difficult with a laptop though unfortunately.

Hope this is useful for someone.

AnthonyUK,

Thanks for the tip on how to type special characters. Now everything I write from here on out will be properly accented, if nothing else.

Here is Malmédy with its proper accent.

And Æ or © or µ and a French ç

You can also use the following if you are using Windows - Start Menu - Accessories » System Tools » Character Map - as you can point and click.
This method is useful for laptop owners.

Glad it was useful.
Made things easier for me when typing up my machin list e.g. Those 16½p and 17½p values

Also, for those of us that are multilingual, you can set your keyboard (in Windows) to US-International. Then it's easy to type all the different letters... The é is formed by typing the accent ' (next to Enter key...) followed by the e. Voilá! An é !