Central Lithuania (Republic Of)

Scott 3 & 5 in Tete-Beche gutter pairs



The back doors of the printers of Central Lithuanian stamps were WIDE OPEN. Polish catalogues describe copious quantities of printers waste.

Double prints of Scott 2, 3 & 5



Even though the stamps are common & cheap, they were forged in the 1930's for the stamp packet trade. CL stamps are found on thin, translucent & thicker, white, roughish paper. The forgeries are on smooth, medium, quite white paper. All my examples are imperf.

Forgery of Scott 2



Forgeries of Scott 36, 39 & 40

Here is another example of the 1921 "Lithuanian Girl". She looks a bit creepy, especially peering from behind the cancellation.

For the sake of completeness, here's some more Central Lithuania. First, here's the Red Cross surcharge from March 1921. There are a number of shades of each of the issue, particularly the 2 + 1M.




Next we have the White Cross fund from April 1921. I don't know what the White Cross fund was for. Maybe for injured servicemen, or a political fund (like the overprints BeeSee posted)? The stamps are the same design as those from December 1920 but re-engraved to include the surcharge in white.




Finally, here's the series issued in February 1922 to commemorate the opening of the National Parliament.

The historical parallels with Crimea 2014 are amazing. Russia = Poland, Crimea = Central Lithuania, Ukraine = Lithuania :)

So dormant topic for the last 7 or 8 years. I'm just getting started in laying out my pages for Central Lithuania and have questions maybe someone can answer. Michel says something about three papers for the first issue: white, cream and grayish. For the issue that replaced those with different colors they state white paper, except also grayish for the high value. Has anyone gone to the effort to differentiate the different papers? I have lots of these (and likely some forgeries) but I'm having a tough time with the cream and grayish paper IDs. My guess is the cream is what other catalogs state is yellowish. But I'm not seeing anything I would call gray. The overprints for the Polish plebiscite seem to all be on white paper, so my guess is they started printing these with poor papers, then switched to good paper for the last few runs.

Still not finding any info other than what is in my Michel. I have examples on white paper, on what is possibly cream paper and some that are maybe grayish. Here is a scan of what I'm thinking matches those three:



Am I barking up the right tree? Or are those latter two forgeries? The first one looks to be obviously genuine, the others much cruder...

I wonder if the emblem on the shield can be used as an indicator of some of the forgeries... If you look at the last three I posted, the design on the shield on the genuine at left has much better detail than the shield on the other two. I'm going to go through the 30 or 40 copies I have to see if that helps. My Janauskas Special Lithuania Postage Stamp Catalogue says there were many papers used, my guess is they can be broadly grouped as Michel does, but trying to collect as such may be a lost cause with the likelihood that there may be several different papers that would fall into each color category. If I can pin down the forgeries and pull them out of my pool I can then look at the genuine and see if the papers can be differentiated by color at all...

So here are paper varieties on the 1920 white cross issues:



Does anyone know if all of these issues are available on both papers, or only some of them?