What Does It Mean

I another post these words were mentioned dunes, trucial or CTO. Being a new collector I was just wondering what these mean?

Dunes and Trucial mean basically the same thing. The Trucial States were a bunch of quasi-countries in the Arabian peninsula (hence "dunes") that became the United Arab Emirates. A few names that come to mind are Ajman, Sharjah, Umm al Qiwain, etc. They issued thousands of stamps that served no postal purpose, mostly really big topical stamps aimed at casual collectors. The Scott Catalog doesn't even recognize them as valid stamps and doesn't list them. Most serious American collectors scorn them although some people do collect them.

CTO means canceled to order. These are stamps that were printed and then canceled without carrying mail and then sold to collectors at below face value. The countries of the former Warsaw Pact and some countries in Africa probably issued the most CTOs. CTOs allowed collectors to obtain the stamps cheaper than the mint stamps, and the postal administrations still made money on the canceled stamps. When someone soaks a stamp off an envelope and saves it, the post office makes nothing, you see. But most serious collectors scorn CTOs as well as they're basically just gummed labels created to get collectors to spend a few dollars on something that never had any intrinsic value. Regular (i.e. non-CTO) stamps either currently have intrinsic value (payment for mailing services) or they did at one time. CTO's never had that intrinsic value, and that's more or less the sticking point with serious collectors.

Hi carabop, before I hit the Post New Reply button, I checked to see if my post might be unnecessary, and sure enough "TheArtfulHinger" beat me to it.....but I don't want to waste all the time it took, plus other information supplied along with some very interesting links.

So here it is:

Trucial can is explained here better than I can paraphrase it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trucial_States.

CTO: Cancelled to Order (cancellation postmark). I have seen that term spelled out here on SCF.

Dunes: Beside the obvious Sand Dune, the definitions that I could find for Dune were, Relating to the Trucial States (later on becoming the United Arab Emirates), a Sci Fi chronicle series by Frank Herbert (Remember those movies with those hugh worms coming up out of the sand dunes?) and a term for "to do away with.

So what do we have, stamps with sand dunes on them, stamps of only the Trucial States or one ugly stamp that needs to be done away with??! We'll have to wait for a more experienced member to tell us exactly what these terms mean within the Stamp Collecting world, and/ or here at SCF. (Which has now been taken care of by TheArtfulHinger!

Thank you TheArtfulHinger!

A link to some beautiful Dune stamps and more info than I can write:

http://www.artonstamps.org/Art-Gall...on-dunes.htm


Linns has a fair list of philatelic terms, but did not have any of the three words/acronyms that you are looking for. Linns link:

http://www.linns.com/reference/terms/terms.aspx

HERE is a link that will take you to a site that has more stamp terms than I could ever imagine: (your three terms weren't there either)
http://glossary.usstamps.org/

I hope that I added a little to your thread!

A few points -----Sand Dune /Trucial States can be found used and on cover ,I believe it was Ken Lawerence {sp} the philatelic researcher had a exhibit at a few shows that won medals . The German catalog issues a separate stamp catalog for them .
The C-T-O-s are issued by many countries , many years ago I purchased a Kilo lot of Japan and the company selling them sold thousands of these Kilo boxes, all came with the same type of cancels all on newspaper or craft paper ,they were squidly {sp} lines or straight lines .The Japanese collectors look down on these and want postal cancels,they are considered CTO .Also many countries have agreements were all unsold stock of stamps are canceled and sold to dealers for collectors so the list of countries selling CTO goes around the whole world .

In case there's any confusion on how to identify CTO stamps, most of the time it's easy - they are stamps with cancellations that have full gum on the back. They also usually are very neatly canceled in one corner only with exactly one-quarter of a round postmark. Even stamps with no gum but postmarked like this are usually CTO.

Wow, thank you very much. I had never heard of these before and it is a lot of good information.

Artfulhinger got me thinking with his comments. The process of cancelling to order is most certainly not a new one. Many early Rhodesia stamps from around 1910 were cancelled to order in order to dispose of excess high value stock to collectors; likewise the first (1873) issue of Iceland which is very rare genuinely postally used but were CTO from the late 1870s, well beyond their postal validity date. Many higher value postage due stamps were CTO for collectors and can be very difficult to distinguish from genuinely postally used examples. As Artfulhinger writes, the best way to distinguish is often a neatly placed postmark, usually across the corner or edge of the stamp.

Here are two examples of postally used and CTO from the "Double Head" issue of British South Africa Company (later to become Rhodesia and then Zimbabwe). Note the slightly messy and centrally placed postmark on the first one: a good indicator for genuine postal use.



Now this next one is far too neat, indicating CTO:



CTO should not, however, be confused with "Cancelled by Favour." This means that a stamp which has not been authorised for postal use, or one with an obvious error (e.g. inverted overprint) is franked and apparently "postally used" usually by collectors who seek to create a rarity value in a stamp. I posted a picture of one of these in a fakes and forgeries thread a couple of weeks ago, showing all the characteristics Artfulhinger mentioned. These stamps can often have an "out of issue" postmark (i.e. a date beyond the postal validity of the stamp).

Here is an example of a South-West Africa stamp which has been cancelled by favour. It is the 1921 overprint on the South Africa £1 value (SG12). The postmark is of a type used in the mid 1930s when the stamp was unlikely to be in circulation for postal use, and it's far too neat.



Many collectors treat these as fakes or at best, curiosities; many dealers on the other hand often sell them at a premium, "forgetting" to mention that they are unlikely to be genuinely postally used... Caveat emptor.

If I could just add that, sometimes, you'll need specialised, local knowledge to pick a CTO.

For example, this Charkhari State 1909 1 Pice, SG 16



is CTO. How do I know? Simply because that type of cancellation was only ever used to CTO stamps. Genuinely commercially used stamps received an entirely different sort of postmark:



as on this 1 Pice orange-brown (SG 15b) from the same set.

Favour cancellations are a more difficult area. They weren't always applied for sinister reasons. Used copies of the Barwani State ¼ Anna on thin paper of 1927, SG 20



are hard enough to find. With nice clear strikes of the Rajpur village cancellation ... The village postmaster would have also been the village policeman or schoolmaster. He was probably quite willing to open up the post office - such as it was - and sell the visitor used copies of all the stamps he had on hand. Favour cancellations, without a doubt, but quite innocent. I would far prefer that these four stamps had been used to post a letter (the four of them would have paid for one standard rate letter in 1927), but beggars can't always choose.

It would be good if someone can change the title page of this discussion from "what does it mean " to a title that is searchable like " C-T-O" or" Favour cancels and cancel to order stamps" .