CTO Stamps Mint Or Used Value.

Are CTO with full gum considered mint or used or somewhere in between. Just wondering as I've come across quite a few full gum CTO in a album I just recieved.

God Bless Stamps and Beer.

If one must chose one box, mint or used, then it falls in the used bin, regardless of whether it has gum or not. It's just not postally used.

Regarding value, it depends on the catalog listing. In general, the used catalog value is for postally used stamps. However, Scott does have footnotes when the used price for a certain time period of some countries is for the CTO (i.e., the postally used stamp is worth more).

In general, when postally used price is given, the CTO value is no greater than the least of the mint or used price.

There is a very small handful of exceptions in which the CTO value is actually significantly greater than the normal postally used price. But these exceptions are very very rare. An example is the Australia kangaroo stamp CTO.

They definitely fall into the used category. For countries the issued them regularly, such as the former Communist countries of Eastern Europe and many developing nations in Africa, etc, the default used value during certain periods is normally for CTO. Scott usually has a footnote to this effect, usually at the start of a period when CTO is most common. Where the default is CTO, postally used are often valued similar to mint, although Scott doesn't price them separately. Some countries (Switzerland and Liechtenstein come to mind) issue CTO's only sporadically or in small numbers, often as cancelled remainders to get rid of old stamp stock. These would be valued, as khj mentioned, at the lower price of used v. mint. CTO, with rare exception, is the least valuable condition of stamp, i.e. they are always going to be worth less than either mint or postally used.

Ah, the Mint-Centric world we live in

Agree that they fall out of mint.

Sniffy about whether/not they fall into used.

Perhaps we can agree on a triad?

Those of you familiar with Texas might know that Denton (pop now ~100k, then much less) was fond of billing itself as the apex of a Dallas / Fort Worth / Denton 'Greater North Texas Triangle'.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

I'm rather fond of calling them CTOs. Why they were ever created is still a mystery to me.

(We could call them the Holy Ghost of ikey's triad.)

CTOs were manufactured to gain revenue for a country. And maybe to promote their philatelic sales - though that's a doubtful thought. A lot of them went directly into "mission mixtures" - in other words - they were used to add weight.

Michel rightfully catalogs them separately. They are not mint, and they are not postally used. At some point, the Soviets and their satellites stopped applying gum during the manufacturing process, and used the printing presses to apply the fake cancels also. With the DDR issues, the CTO's were completely different printings, in some cases.

I consider CTO´s as no more than spacefillers, with close to zero value. If available I would even rather add a slightly damaged used or mint stamp into my albums than a CTO, as I do consider CTO´s cancellations to ruin the stamps. I have also considered not to include the CTO´s in my albums at all, but I guess that would leave too much empty spaces and even empty pages for certain countries...
Northener0, I hope I do not spoil your excitement for the new album of yours. This is just my personal take on it, hope you enjoy your stamps still

Thanks for all the comments guys. I'm on the fence with these not sure if I hate em or love em. But like Blaamand said, at least they make good spacefillers.

God Bless Stamps and Beer.

I actually like CTOs ... if they reflect the genuine experiences and values of the issuing countries. Give me a good Karl Marx DDR CTO over a puppy or a butterfly any day!

Many more countries issued space stamps than every went into space, but I suspect that most space topicalists could care less, and I would allow space stamps a 'one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind' exemption.

But the other 'shares' get kinda silly.

Bobby Kennedy, Ajman? Seriously?

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

Wow that's a pretty harsh comment about these little guys.

In my opinion CTO's served a purpose as every kid
collector knows when he/she sent away for those "free"
stamp packets.
Some of those gaudy East European CTO's looked better/fresher/newer
than a lot of the other common "postally" used stuff.


?

I prefer a lightly cancelled CTO, over a heavily obliterated postally used stamp any day.

Here are 3 examples of Czechoslovakia Scott 1729 issued in 1971

Left CTO Middle postally used Right mint



For me collecting is mainly about the image and the engraving therefore the CTO is more "valuable" than the middle one.


NB: Replaced missing image

Tell that to my Labuan #107a (no unused or postally used examples are known to exist).

If we're talking about post-WW2 Iron Curtain or modern wallpaper stuff that is available CTO in ubiquity, sure it's worthless; most stamps are. You don't have to get very far in a collection before you'll need a cancelled to order stamp, though; there are too many issues that are only known to exist CTO, even though at some point they presumably existed in unused or postally used state. And there are many, many more cases in which unused and postally used stamps exist in theory, but are nearly unobtainable.

Ha ha, I knew I would probably cause some uproar by my standpoint regarding CTO´s....

Fortunately different collectors have different preferences. And fortunately CTO´s are considered ok by some of us.

Lithograving: Quite interesting you made that comparison with Czeko stamps. I just finished off an immense 4 liters accumulation of Czechoslovakian stamps last month. (Puh...)) I would guess that about 90% of the stamps after 1950s were CTO´s, and of the remaining cancelled stamps the majority had postmarks that were far from as attractive as your postally used stamp above. Which make them rare in comparison. I do appreciate the stamp design, but personally just as well the power of a nice postmark.

For me a CTO is a stamp that has been sold in the purpose of making money, not to carry mail as per the original concept of postage stamps - which in my opinion make them much less attractive. I do agree the wording ´spacefiller´ sounds quite harsh - my apologies, I did not want to offend anyone that see things differently. I just wanted to say that in my albums the CTO´s are actually only filling spaces until postally used or mint specimens come around...

Codehappy - the Labuan example is rather rare. Let it be said - I love classical stamps in general! But in this case even a classical stamp (that only exists CTO) should in my opinion be listed alongside suspicious Dunes issues etc in the appendix. Apologise, that´s just my personal opinion...

I won't turn up my nose at a CTO if it fills a space in my collection, but I will replace it with a mint copy or a decent postally used copy as soon as one comes along. I find them distasteful for the same reason Blamaand mentioned - they were never valid for postage and are just a moneymaking scheme. Why that should bother me, I really don't know. As if postal administrations don't issue mint stamps as a moneymaking scheme. I guess if a stamp was never valid for postage - and CTO's never were - is it really even a (postage) stamp? I'm an omnivore in my collecting habits, so I collect them, anyway, but I've never been crazy about them, even as a kid.

See, the great thing about collecting is that everybody is free to decide what they think is legitimate, and nobody is really wrong.

But if the criterion is that stamps issued "in the purpose of making money" selling to collectors are bogus, then many, many classics are non-stamps.

Take the US Columbians or the Canadian Jubilees for example -- there was no legit postal need for all the high-denomination stamps in those sets. They were issued solely to gouge collectors, from day one. In that respect, they aren't any different than Elvis stamps from Burkina Faso, just older. But they are very popular nonetheless, and I'm not going to tell the many, many collectors who enjoy them or exhibit them that their stamps are not legitimate, valueless, or philatelic wallpaper.

How do I handle such sets? For the Columbians, I try to find them commercially used. Mint is easy; all you need is money. But commercially used is crazy hard for any of the higher denominations, and when I do find them, they are almost always used out of period. Expo cancels, especially on high values, are near-guarantees that the stamp was a philatelic use (to produce a souvenir) -- yet there are collectors who pay a premium for Columbians with expo cancels! Just goes to show, de gustibus non est disputandum.