What Are 'Wall Paper' Stamps? Also CTO Questions.

I wonder if anyone has done a wall papered with stamps

It wasn't just McCarthyism that put collectors of the 1950s off of the stamps of the eastern European "satellite" nations, it was also these nations' elephantine, indiscriminate stamp programs, spewing forth many scores of new issues every year. That virtually all of them appeared in the West as CTOs just seemed to confirm that the stamps were blatantly tools of propaganda as well as a way to capture hard currencies. That their stamps had a propagandistic ambition, though, wasn't unusual, since so in greater or lesser degree do the stamps of virtually every stamp-issuing authority.

A cancelled stamp with intact gum is a dead giveaway of its CTO status, but I've found quite a few cancelled stamps that lack gum but I'm pretty certain are CTOs. For instance, I purchased on ebay a collection of Swiss commemoratives from about 1955-75 in which a good number of the stamps were blocks neatly cancelled in the block's middle so that a quadrant of the cancellation appeared on each stamp; none of them were still gummed. I also suspect that some stamps that I've acquired of the oversized France fine art annual series are CTOs, and they also lack gum. But it's often very difficult to diagnose CTOs, because all of us have many, many stamps in our collections with neat cancels that almost certainly weren't CTOs.

Those issues of France and Switzerland (as well as some others) are probably more accurately described as "remainders". Although the end result - a cancelled stamp that hasn't gone through the mail - is the same, the intent behind it is somewhat different. Eastern European CTO's were issued in CTO format from the start, whereas some other countries (like Switzerland) just take leftover stock, cancel them and sell them to collectors at a discount rather than destroying them.

In theory CTO's sound like a win-win. Postal administrations get some money from collectors for used stamps (as opposed to ones soaked off an envelope, for which they get nothing) and collectors get sound, neatly cancelled stamps without soaking or paying full mint price. No killer cancels, no scuff marks from the sorting machines, etc.