Northwest Russia: Army Of The North Stamps

Why a cancellation "error"? Why would someone knocking out CTOs be overly concerned about exactitude?

Well, because perhaps, CTO stamps are stamps that are specially prepared to be visually attractive and for those that I have seen, the canceladle cares that they look good and beautiful, since they are to be sold to collectors, unlike what happens with a cancellation of ordinary mail

You are talking about civil war issues, not about a philatelic bureau.

If genuine and CTO, they were used to raise funds, not to fill stamp albums.

Sorry for my ignorance, but how do you obtain funds from a CTO without selling it to collectors?

You do, to those collectors that venture where the album editors do not go. It is not the GDR where some poor guy would sit in a chair doing a senseless job until he dies or retires. Neat CTOs were irrelevant. Sell the stuff was the credo.

I don't quite understand it, since the final recipient is the collector, and the CTO should be beautiful to be sold at a good price, but I can accept that there are "defective" CTOs (mine with triple cancellation is the first example I see , you always learn something new).
However, what formula exists to know with certainty when a cancellation is or is not original in this series?

You are thinking like a collector of the 1960s and 1970s when CTOs were well-established and a means of generating cash in USD, DM, and GBP for the post office. When album publishers and catalogue editors, certainly, would include them in their editions.

When these stamps were issued, it was opportunistic and questionable whether they would be included in albums or even listed. Even the status of the stamps is highly questionable. Also, the issuer might cease to exist. So, if you collected anything that had gum on the back, you grabbed what you could grab, no moaning about how beautifully the cancellation was placed in a corner. Nor was the issuer in a situation where they could set up a philatelic service to service orders for neat CTO stamps to fill album pages.

And indeed, when were these cancelled?

Thanks, now I understand the point better. Still, I find the triple cancellation baffling for a CTO even under the special circumstances of the time.

There are several ways in which CTOs are created. In really high volume, they simply print the cancellation along with the rest of the stamp. In merely high volume they would create a plate to print all the cancel on the sheet at once. In low volume someone would manually hit each block of four with a hand canceler. The end result didn't make much difference, the sheets weren't sold to collectors, they were sold to wholesalers who sold to dealers who sold to collectors.

BILLSEY---Thanks for clearing that up .

Also let us remember the early stamp album makers and publishers . Were not clear which stamps were postal items and often added items on request from interested parties . This why items were listed that had questionable sources .

Do not confuse 2024 with 1920.

A lot of the older CTOs from European countries were available to collectors from the postal authorities. And this lasted until deep into the 1990s. The cancels were not printed either.

Here is another way your stamp might have received a double (or triple) partial cancellation of the NWA Field PTO. It might have been on one of the fabricated covers of the period, similar to the ones shown in the page from the Rossica Journal below (Alexander Epstein article):

Great information!! Much obliged!!! From my point of view, a double CTO cancellation does not seem to me to be something common, I am not saying that not exist and that can occur for the most diverse reasons... but the most logical thing is that a double cancellation is original, since that is something that commonly happens in the postal service, but not in the CTOs... I'm no longer saying a triple cancellation...

Here is an additional page from the same article, so that you can have more complete information regarding this cancellation.