Bavaria C. 1910 Railroad Parcel Stamps

Does anyone have any of these stamps? If you do, can you pls take a look and let me know what watermark you find on them? Thanks!

I don't have any of them, but wish I did; they are really nice. Re your question, I may be wrong, but I don't think one can see watermarks from the front. I'm interested to see what the experts say.

Donald

He's assuming that someone has the physical stamp, so he can test it with watermark fluid.

This is far from an exhaustive search, but I pulled six or eight and all were 'crosses and circles' except one, which may not show a watermark. Wouldn't bet the farm on that, though.

Similar to this:

Thanks for looking, Cjd!

What is interesting is that this watermark is not a Bavarian one at all. It's from Wuerttemberg and is the normal wmk on issues from that state. (I presume that Bavaria bought a supply of watermarked stamp paper from Wuerttemberg at some point.) I'm pretty sure that this is the only Bavarian issue on which this particular wmk can be found.

My 70pf has a different overprint (the Kgl. Bayer. one) and seems to be a different colour than the one shown in the very nice set posted above:



Incidentally, the same wmk sometimes appears, but by mistake, on some Inflation-era German stamps and stamps with it are usually worth a great deal.

The revenues of the Bayerische Staatseisenbahnen (Bavarian State Railway) are cataloged in Erler-Jünke's Katalog der Stempelmarken von Deutschland (Catalogue of the Adhesive Revenue Stamps of Germany), Vol. XVII.

In total, there are 52 main varieties, with numerous sub-varieties due to color shades and paper differences.

Here's a general overview --

Stamps of the first set (#1-14) from 1904 have the "Kgl." in the overprint, and are without watermark.

Stamps of the second set (#15-26) are the same, but with a watermark of crossed diagonal lines.



The third set is a single stamp (#27) from 1910, identical to the first set (w/o watermark), but in a previously unreleased value (10 Pf).

Stamps of the fourth set (#28-40) from 1911/17 have the crosses and circle watermark shown by Cjd.

Stamps of the fifth set (#41-52) from 1920 do not have "Kgl." in the overprint, and have the crosses and circle watermark.

Hope this helps. If you'd like to see the relevant listings from the catalog, let me know.

I have a full envelope of them now, and don't have idea what to do with them at all... even not able to help you with the watermarks, because they are on papers...

My recommendation is to carefully stick them in an envelope, mail them to me for safe keeping :)

I believe I've read that the crosses and circles watermark was used at Berlin's German Imperial Printing Office, but I'd need confirmation of that before putting it on a stamp page. For example, the watermark appears on stamps of Liberia that were printed in Germany.

I'll poke around this evening and see if I can confirm that.

stallzer, they don't deserve to be safe kept... you can find them everywhere... the mint ones are more scarce.

filipo, that's a marvellous collection, because in many cases you have the complete cancels. (I collect German and Bavarian railway cancels, so there's at least one there that I'd like to buy if you're selling.) In those cases, please, whatever you do, don't soak the stamps off the paper!!

PostmasterGS, thanks so much for the information. These stamps are not listed in my Michel specialised, so I had to plough through online listings to obtain any information about them at all. The crossed diagonal lines watermark is new to me and not illustrated in Michel as a Bavarian wmk. I wonder if this is the only occasion on which it was used. Also, I wonder whether this set was printed on paper derived from a foreign source. It wouldn't surprise me if this wmk was Swiss or Hungarian or something.

jimjamtwo,

Shoot me your e-mail address.

I just placed them in an appropriate album, so, if someone want to see all the stamps from my previous scan, should go to the link here:



http://s1221.photobucket.com/albums...zno/bavaria/



Here is just one page: