CTO Stamps Mint Or Used Value.

@bookbndrbob

Thanks for showing those examples I will check
if I have those CTO's and see if they have gum or not.

Most of the stamps I have from the former Soviet block
are from Czechoslovakia where I have CTO's, postally used
and Mint.

Here is another discussion back in 2010 about CTO's or NOT.


https://goscf.com/t/11520&whichpage...O%2Cor%2CNOT

This has evolved into a delightfully informative discussion. Well done, all!




Well, for that matter, delivering mail is posited as a moneymaking scheme. Now & again.

I prefer to argue function, rather than motivation, but, either way, CTOs fall in with all of the other postal souvenirs.




I've softened in my old age.

I still believe that <rude>when an FDC did not travel thru the mail, the 'C' stands for 'cargo'</rude>, but I've come to think that they are an excellent vehicle for introducing innocents to the hobby, as they combine a stamp, a legible date, a legible slogan, and a bit of art, all neatly mounted on what amounts to a convenient stock card.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey (who is clearly getting enough fiber if he's willing to say something nice about FDCs)

Ditto.

I love all the info and comments that are coming out of this topic.

This is what I posted on Czechoslovakian CTOs elsewhere:

Czechoslovakian CTOs served to make stamps of exquisite facture available in perfect condition and at a fraction of the nominal price to lovers of the beautiful in stamps primarily in my country, where such stamps, even if printed in small runs and seldom found on the mail, were widely available to young collectors educating them not to become investors in stamps but those enjoying the art of the postage stamp as created by many of the country's foremost artists, master engravers and master printers - fervent believers in this kind of art but few of them supporters of the regime they had to live under.

If any money was raised thanks to the cheap CTOs, it was no doubt reinvested in raising the standards of the very same art as further developments have shown.

Recent developments in world-wide stamp issuing policies and the latest new issues collecting trends seem to support the tendency. Collectors do aim at what they really like among the flood of pricy new issues if not concentrating on earlier ones.
( https://goscf.com/t/9106&whichpage=175#420971 )



I remember only Hungarian, North Vietnamese and Mongolian CTO stamps on ungummed paper, all of them printed in Hungary in the 1950s - 1980s.

florian - thanks for adding a totally different aspect to the discussion. Your contribution makes one think outside the narrow borders of stamp collecting itself. I will try to maintain a more forgiving attitude towards my CTO´s in the future...

To be sure that specific CTO's of a country were prepared on ungummed paper, one would have to be resident, or stamp specialist of that country.

Great post florian. I will say that Czech stamps have some of the highest aesthetic standards and beauty of any stamp issuing country of the world.

I like Czech stamps as well. My only complaint is with the gum; I've seen too many situations where the Czech stamps were all stuck to the page or to each other, much worse than any other country, it seems. I've got quite a few gum-less Czech CTOs in my collection as a result.

I look at most CTO as a step above a Cinderella...but you may have to allow for them philatelically as Scotts (the "authoritative source for this stuff) assigns them a catalog number. Consequently, if you are into collecting a county's stamps and using a catalog to define your "collection", you must consider a CTO as a "collectable" stamp in whatever type/character/form... it is issued and available. Mint? No. Used? No. Postally Used? No. Forgeries? Hmmm. Soooooo... bottom line, a CTO is not mint, not used, not postally used, .... it's just a Cinderella with a government provided cancelation on it.

CTO values... whatever the most current catalog says less 80-95% or whatever the latest auction sale price is.