CTO - But What For?

Strange that it's never occurred to me before - but CTO stamps, eg Trucial States etc - why bother cancelling them? It's not as if overseas buyers (which they were largely intended for) are going to actually use them for postage.

Not only do non-cancelled stamps look more pristine, and tend to be thought of as worth more, but cancelling them takes up time and money. So why bother cancelling them at all? Or, if there is a reason, why are they not available in roughly 50-50 quantities, cancelled and not cancelled? It seem non-cancelled ones are very uncommon by comparison.

One obvious reason for producing CTO stamps was that, being cancelled, they could be sold at less than face value, since they were 'used'. 'Mint' stamps, on the other hand, had to be sold at face value if even a fig-leaf of legitimacy was to be maintained for the issues.

I've long been entertained by the 1931 pictorial set issued by Charkhari State.



It was dumped on the stamp market CTO at rock-bottom prices. Even today, Gibbons prices the set 'used' at £2, or about new issue price - ignoring inflation over the last 80-odd years.

The set mint is a bit better. Gibbons prices it at £55, or about 50 times face value. So far, so good. The set ends with a 5 Rupee (around 25p at that time) top value. This was pure fantasy. A local letter (and Charkhari stamps were only valid within Charkhari) cost ½ Anna, or one 160th of the top value; a registered letter cost 2 Annas, or one 40th of 5 Rupees.



Gibbons prices the 5 Rupee mint at £10. However, the roughly contemporary Orchha State (a larger neighbour of Charkhari) 5 Rupee mint is priced at £275; it was not dumped on the market at under face value, as the Charkhari stamps were.

All of which is not to say that CTO stamps are necessarily to be ignored. Genuinely used examples of stamps that were generally CTOed can be very worthwhile. Just try finding, let alone buying, examples of those Dunes CTOs on genuine commercial covers! Even that Charkhari 2 Anna cover I showed above is a real rarity. Used (CTO) the 2 Anna is listed at 10p, but I wouldn't take £100 for the cover.

Personally, I dislike CTOs and their cousins 'favour' cancellations, but they can have their place.

I always thought that the stamps were sold both 'mint' and 'used' because some completionists would, therefor, buy both.

Not to mention the 'investors' who would cover their bets as to which set would, uh, 'appreciate' more.

Recently, it occurred to me that the postal authorities issuing CTOs knew that there was some doubt about the postal authenticity of their stamps, so the 'fact' that the stamps were cancelled would 'prove' that they really were, you know, postage stamps.

Nah ... they didn't care enough for that ... they just knew that some folks buy only mint, some folks buy only used, and some folks buy both.

From the issuer's side, once you've put out the 'real' money - for the plates - it costs just about nothing to create mint/used versions of each stamp.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

Well, when someone soaks a used stamp off an envelope the postal authority makes nothing, you see. They have no interest in people collecting postally used stamps. In theory, CTO's would be a win-win. The postal authority gets something from used stamps, people get nice, undamaged, neatly cancelled stamps at a nice discount off face value. No soaking necessary. Of course the problem with that theory is that most serious collectors of used stamps much prefer stamps that have actually carried mail.

Many "CTO"S are not even cancelled, they are printed "cancels".

If the stamps are mint and they return to the home country, they represent an expense to the postal service if they are used. At the same time, it is hard to imagine a business or individual in Sharjah or Ajman requiring large amounts of postage. The CTO markings certainly guarantee that the stamps can't be used.

The Swiss plan ahead and eliminate the possibility of their mint semi-postals "coming home to roost" by giving them a very short period of validity. Also, I'm reasonably certain the Swiss stamps can't be bought at below face value as an original purchase.

Asking nicely (honest!):

Q/ Have you ever lived in one of these countries?

If the DoonVille branch of the First National Bank of DoonLand actually *did* repatriate a large (U$D 100s?) amount of mint postage, and DoonPost noticed, and DoonPost cared, the most it would take would be one call from the palace, and the stamps would be in the shredder.

But that supposes that DoonPost would notice, or care. More likely, if they noticed, they would figure that all this repatriated postage really amounted to was a little extra work for their Dooner clerks ... and its not like management is gonna get a call from the union, now, is it?

To formalize the thought: the countries that issue CTOs are not the countries with the administrative & financial controls that would allow them to care about a potential liability from repatriating postage. Discuss.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

I can see the logic though. They obviously needed to sell the stamps under face value, so if they were un-cancelled, then someone could buy a stack of them cheaply in the West, and have them sent home, thereby obtaining them well below the normal cost of postage. I don't know if that's the case, but it's logically possible that this is why they were pre-cancelled.

Ringo: I think you are travelling in a bit of a, well, ring.

The 'mint' unused stamps - the ones that, in another universe, they might worry about being repatriated - were sold at face value, were they not? (That they might eventually be available post-collector at less than face value is a tragedy, but not relevant to the issuer).

The 'used' CTOs were not subject to repatriation and, therefor, could be sold at any price north of ink'n'paper (and the all-important gum).

The CTOs were not sold out of fear of repatriation; they were sold out of fear of leaving pockets unpicked.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

Selling to overseas countries to pass on to collectors. After all, that's what most were made for in the first place. If I, as a kid in England, wanted to buy a mini-sheet of 24 Ajman stamps, they need to be available at less than face-value, so my pocket money will bag them for me.

As fredcdobbs said, most of the Trucial States CTO's were printed directly on the stamps, so no extra cost was involved.

Many countries produce CTO's with the same handstamp that is used to cancel regular mail, and sell them at face value. Once the gum is soaked off, there is practically no well to tell them apart from postally used examples.

Question -

Does anyone know what the first CTO stamp was? I thought that it started some time in the 70s but I could be way off.

I guess to answer this question we need to separate CTO (Cancelled to Order) stamps from Favor Cancelled stamps. I view CTO's as stamps that were printed with cancels on the stamp, and the stamps were never really issued for postage. A favor cancelled stamp is a legitimate postage stamp that was postmarked in a post office and then sold to the philatelic trade (a practice that has been going on far longer than the printing of CTO stamps).

If anyone has any real history behind this practice, it would be a very interesting contribution to the conversation.

I haven't heard that definition before. Is there a source? I have, among others, Russian stamps from 1940 and before that I have always assumed were CTO but with cancels that clearly were not printed on the stamps. If I've been wrong all these years, I'm always interested in learning something new.

In the strict sense of the term, Cancelled-to-order (CTO) can be applied to any philatelically used stamp - from used reprints of classic stamps (EG 1875 reprints of earlier US stamps) - that were not readily available to the public - to gimicky airmail covers that began prior to WWI and even German Zeppelin mail - all of these could be said to be CTO as opposed to postally used. I know that Germany started ramping-up sales of CTOs in the form of collectable first-day issue cards and covers sold at fairs & exhibitions in the late 20s and 30s.

I am curious, however, as to when the term CTO was coined. Does anyone know?

Brian

While I haven't ever looked into it much, I have seen many CTO stamps where the postmarks differ from stamp to stamp, eg by being in different corners, and I guessed that most of them actually were hand-stamped. Some definitely are - how many, I don't know. I just typed "Ajman 1970" into ebay and spotted two sets of that year's Christmas stamps near the top of the top of the listing, and they have very different "postmarks" (oval shaped - each set has the oval slanted in different directions), so they are cancelled properly - the mark isn't printed as part of the design.

Ikey - I don't know why you say I'm travelling in a ring. I also don't understand what you mean about fear of pockets being unpicked (did you mean fear of them being picked?). Anyway, I don't get the point you're making. I don't know if mint ones were sold at face value or not, since many of them never went near the original country's postal system. They were made to sell to collectors, not for postal need. But it seems to me that mint examples are only a fraction of the stamps available to market - maybe 10 percent?

All of these practices have evolved over time, so the more you look, and the further back you look, the more variety you will find.

I have always understood CTOs to be stamps that were mass-cancelled, on a press, most typically by applying one stunningly legible circular CDS to four stamps at once; hence, they all have a way-too-nice 'just grabbed the corner' cancel, with the bonus that you could also sell the immaculately once-cancelled center-cancelled block-of-four.

While there are no doubt SOTN (Socked On The Nose) CTOs, I think that these were all much less common than the four-corner CTOs, because the ever-targeted topical collectors would be a whole lot more interested in seeing the design, clearly - and, as Ringo has correctly pointed-out - cheaply.

I have always understood 'favor cancels' to mean that a card or cover (as opposed to loose stamps), singly or in bulk, were hand-cancelled by a (presumably single) clerk, and handed-back.

The hand-back might have been to keep them clean, and/or to keep them from getting lost, and/or to save waiting for them to arrive at a destination, and/or so that they might remain unaddressed, et al.

I have also always understood that most first flight covers, ship covers, (philatelic) show covers, etc, may all properly be called 'favor cancels', but are more usefully known by their topical names, as the market for them seems to be driven more by condition than by whether/not they actually traveled thru the mail.

Q/ What was the name of the dealer/consortium that made that deal with the (principally, if memory serves) Latin American countries? The dealer/consortium paid for the design & printing of the stamps, on the condition that, at the end of one year, the stamps would be de-monetized and the excess stock returned to, uh, sender.

As I say, these practices have evolved over time ;)

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey