Cto's

Why are CTO's printed with gum on the back? For the purposes of the issuing country, no gum would only be better.

They are not printed CTO. They are normal postage stamps first, then if requested a per favor cancel is applied by the postal clerk.

To make it clearer, I am referring to the mass produced CTOs that were so prevalent from the Easter Bloc contries. Those stamps were issued only to be CTOs.I doubt that there are any examples of them either postaly used or unused. They were printed to be CTOs!

Joe
They were certainly available unused, and thus also exist with legit cancellations from postal use. And if this hadn't been the case, they'd have joined the stamps added in appendices in SG catalogues because they don't meet certain basic criteria about availability in the originating country etc. Why gum on the back? - much easier than taking it off!
Regards.
Geoff

A stamp sheet for collectors with a printed "cancellation" would be a precancel - not a CTO. Not that such a thing exists as far as I know.

Joe:

Try reading this Refresher Course from Linn's website. I think it will help clarify a few points...

http://www.linns.com/howto/refreshe...rcourse.aspx

KirkS

From the Linns article referenced above. In which case the question is, then why have the sheets gummed?

I'm wondering if the stamp printing>perforating>gumming was part of one continuous process in which case you couldn't cut out the gumming part without severely disrupting the chain. It might have been far easier to wait for the completed stamp before applying the cancel.

This, of course, wouldn't apply if the cancellation was the important part of the process in which case the set up was without gum from the start such as the Trucial States or those lovely East German definitives of the 50's which we tried to make complete sets of not realising they were worthless.

Czechoslovakia should have gone down that path, their engraved stamps were lovely but they were ALWAYS stuck together in mixtures

I've wondered this myself as well, but one of the reasons might be that the casual collectors that CTOs were aimed at might have actually preferred them with gum. I'm not saying that they in fact did - I don't know one way or another - I'm just speculating that might be one of the reasons. To a casual collector who knows nothing about the stamps other than what he sees in front of him, the presence of gum would probably make the stamps look newer and fresher than the same stamps without gum. If there were no other reason for it, such as printing or perforating issues, etc, the gum might have been nothing more than a marketing gimmick.

not to confuse more than now but didn't some postal agencies/authorities make it illegal to sell bulk to foreign brokers the mint stamps & the only way they could be sent out of country to a broker was to apply a cancel to kill the validity of being used for postage or exchanging later for cash as exchange rates moved in favor of the holder?? (or was that covered in the article & I missed it because of a fast scan)??

I wish I had known what CTO's were back in the early days of my collecting. I was in my early teens in the 70's. No telling how much money I wasted. I find these "stamps" particularly unattractive nowadays.

The above link explains a lot. But! Romania for example didn`t stopped marketing CTO`s after 1991.




Romanian stamp, issued in 1993, CTO with gum, stucked to Wietnam Cto`s.
Was found in philatelic package, bought a few (2-3) years ago. Package was assembled probably around 1999-2000. I saw many romanian CTO`s from 1999 too. Probably marketing CTO`s in Romania stopped only in 2001.

I think that completing a postaly used Romanian collection is virtually impossible, even if you don`t intend to get postaly used imperfed souvenir sheets from the `70's (some of these were issued in quantities around 25.000- I`m sure that CTO`s are even rarer than MINT blocks!!). Before 1990 for an average stamp collector it was impossible to buy from post offices these imperfed souvenir sheets (unless he bribed someone at the post office). There are 41 counties in Romania. From let`s say 25.000 souvenir sheets 20.000 were sold at post offices. 500 pieces/county. Usually party officials got them before being offered for sale at post offices in county seats.

I'd debate that they were normal stamps.
There was an unclear period in Romanian Philately that CTO's were gummed with what appears to be
gross mucilage. It is hard to move with any solvent.
I'd suggest they were gummed with a second grade cement or whatever was at hand
Produced only for the collector's market.
You can see that on the common definitives of that era.
Normal Romanian gum is clear and light and easily moved

Unless my memory fails me, in the late 60s one could buy annual collections of stamps from some countries ... CTOs naturally. WITHOUT gum.

Really Nice To See You Again Rod!

As an aside, are CTO's still widely produced? Or just the wallpaper that one sees all over the place.