Definitives From Around The World

Nice ones Cjd. Perfect examples of definitives.

Post WWII Germany, French Occupation Zone.

First definitive issue 1945/46 printed by the French State Printer
via 3 colour typography for the lower values.
Missing are the 30pf and 10pf which is the expensive one
of the set.

How about some Canadian caricatures 1973-77

ok, I defiantly need a few beers in my definitive stamp future.



....and one more...

BC, yes we need some Canadian ones. I was going to post these but
I knew you would.

Another good one would be all the flags on one page.

I am with you Filia!

Here are the rest of the French Occupation Zone.













And the engraved high values.

Fifia I hate to break it to you but that Belgian one
commemorates The Year of the Beer Michel 2282

Spanish Francos right out of my childhood album.

This is where rod222 will come in and post a Franco image that nobody has and that has a catalogue value of 25c



I have no clue what those Valencia stamps are...

This is what I have of the French Occupied Zone



and France

The Valencia ones are tax stamps which were obligatory
for all domestic mail between 1962 - 1973

Nice fifia, you have the 30pf. The 10pf used is worth a few bucks.
But it has to be geprüft.

Pretty fancy looking, but still a definitive...the high value (5 shillings) View of Vavau Harbor, from the 1897 set of Tonga:




German colonial definitives, depicting the Kaiser's yacht Hohenzollern, first from German East Africa, and then from German South West Africa:





The German definitives are often great sources of town cancels...the postmasters seem to be unusually precise in their strikes.

Closing out with a couple more of Queen Victoria:
A pair from Lagos:



and one from St. Vincent:

lithograving, I noticed on the 5fo Hungary town definitives with the color variation that the imprint on the bottom of the stamp is distinctly different (one is much bolder than the other, and the letters are spaced farther apart). The imprint seems identical on the two 8fo stamps.
Cheers, Robert

In classic-era definitives, there is a prevalence of the color sequence of green, red, blue in the low values. This is due to the agreement among the Universal Postal Union countries to use green for stamps that would cover the printed matter rate internationally, red for postcards, and blue for letters. Foreign postmasters wouldn't have to read the rate; they could check the colors.

There are, of course, lots of examples of variations from this scheme. And there are very often colors falling between the green, red and blue stamps, doing duty domestically paying other rates. (The colors didn't directly relate to domestic mail, except that green was often enough for a local postcard, and red was often enough for a domestic letter.)

Here is a rerun of the Lagos stamps, this time with the blue stamp added for visual effect:



I figured this might be interesting within a discussion of definitives.