Equatorial Guinea Stamps

Can anyone tell me what the deal is with the catalog listings for many of the Equatorial Guinea stamps. I am working from a 2010 Scott Catalog.

Stamps from 1972 to 1978 are listed in paragraph format with no listing for prices. Are these stamps worth nothing? A lot of what I have to put in my book today fall into this category.

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The "issues" of many countries from the 1960s onwards aren't given formal listings by most catalogues because they were never genuinely on sale/in use in the individual country. And yes, they're worth next to nothing. Many other stamps that ARE listed probably shouldn't be.

The stamps are very common and have no philatelic value.

Eq Guinea is one of a fairly large group of countries which out-source their stamps to companies for sale almost entirely to collectors. Most of these stamps have no actual postal use. Although they are valid for use in their countries, most do not even get shipped there but are shipped to stamp distributors and/or stamp dealers. Clearly, this seems a bit like a scam if not outright cheating. Aren't stamps used on mail? Not always. Often they are issued almost entirely to sell to collectors and often never get used on mail. This is pretty common.

Some countries which issue stamps that are often used for postal purposes also out-source their stamps, as well, so it's sometimes a bit hard to know where to draw the line. It's not the out-sourcing to some European printer that matters so much as whether the stamps ever even go to the country that is supposedly issuing them and using them.

The main evidence is in the quantity of these stamps some countries issue. When you issue many, many stamps which are never shipped to your country or even used there, that makes them purely speculative, some might even say illegitimate, stamp issues.

An additional issue that some consider an insult to collectors is that the subject matter of many of these stamps often has little or nothing to do with the issuing country. But maybe this is not so bad since all countries nowadays issue stamps for silly reasons on some pretty silly subjects. You don't 'have' to issue stamps only about your own country, and no one says you can't issue an Elvis or Princess Diana stamp or a set of stamps about horses even if there's never been a horse within a thousand miles of your country.

But the questionable stamp issuing countries do this so often -- and in such huge quantities that it's clear that the stamps are created only for sale to topical or beginning collectors who won't know the difference and are not used to mail letters.

Of course, everyone is perfectly free to collect whatever they want, one of the attractions of our hobby. It's hardly a crime to fill an album with stamps about dogs, Princess Di, Elvis, or whatever you like from whatever country you like -- even if the people in that country have no idea these stamps even exist. You're basically buying attractive stamp-like labels. And far be it from me to even point out that some countries (Eq Guinea is one) have ruthlessly autocratic, even murderous governments whose leaders use torture against their own citizens, while those same leaders may profit from collectors purchasing their stamps. So I won't even mention that.

Some decades ago, Scott Publishing Co. tried to announce 'black blots' about such stamps, denouncing them, calling them illegitimate, and refusing to list them in their catalogues. The problem with this was that it had a very condescending tone for white Europeans to tell small, largely non-white countries what kind of stamps they were allowed to issue. And in these countries' defense, stamps were sometimes a major source of revenue for a poor country -- even if they never did any real postal duty. Even major countries sometimes see stamps as a revenue source. And some small, very white countries like Liechtenstein and Monaco rely heavily on issuing stamps for speculative purposes. So the line between good and bad isn't completely clear.

Look at modern Japanese stamps , for example (and some modern U.S. stamps, too). I've never seen so many silly cartoon characters in my life. But they do postal duty. And people like them. So who am I to judge? And I own a few Grateful Dead souvenir sheets issued by Mongolia, so who am I to talk?

In any case, the catalogs today generally get around this problem by simply listing these so-called stamps but not necessarily providing images or details about them as they do with stamps that do see postal use. That way, collectors can decide for themselves what to do, and the catalogs don't get even larger than they already are. If you see these blocks of text on page after page for many stamps or where the stamps' subject matter is not related to that country at all, those are the questionable stamps Scott/Amos wishes would go away.

Good thoughts, DrewM. I've been pleased to use Simpsons, Star Wars, and Harry Potter stamps on my outgoing mail in recent years.

One minor point; if I remember correctly, wasn't it the APS that did the "black blots" back in the 1970s? I joined the APS in early 1974. Scott may have followed by not listing same in their catalogues.

Excellent posting DrewM . Agree with you and good explanation .

Hello.
Seven years of harmful emissions have done too much damage to RGE, although not as much as its internal policy.
At present, around 20 stamps are issued annually from the National Spanish Currency and Stamp Factory (F.N.M.T.) 75,000 pieces from each.
I collect Equatorial Guinea, colony, stamps and trading cards.
Regards.

WIKIPEDIA
Philately RGUE.
The region was under Spanish rule until 1969. The stamps of this period reflect the evolution in the name of the colony.

Between 1868 and 1902 the denomination Fernando Poo was used throughout the colony.
Between 1903 and 1908 the denominations Fernando Poo in Bioko, Elobey, Annobón and Corisco were used in the other islands and Spanish Continental Guinea in the continental sector.
Between 1908 and 1951 the denomination Spanish Territories of the Gulf of Guinea was used throughout the territory.
Between 1951 and 1959 the denomination Guinea Spanish in all the territory was used.
Between 1960 and 1968 the denominations Fernando Poo in the islands and Río Muni in the continental sector were used.
Since 1968, the name is Republic of Equatorial Guinea.
In 1968 he declared himself independent. The stamps were issued by the National Currency and Stamp Factory in Spain. But in 1971 a contract was made with various companies and hundreds of stamps began to be issued exclusively for philatelic purposes.

This craze for compulsory broadcasts continued until 1979, the year in which a coup d'etat overthrew the government and annulled postal emissions contracts. Control of the same was returned to the National Currency and Stamp Factory, which limited the amount of emissions.

The amount of emissions in the period 1972-1979 is so great that international catalogs do not show them, they only mention them quickly. And the Spanish catalogs jump from 1972 to 1980 directly (ignoring all the emissions not made in the FNMT).

You'd be surprised. All of the gold foil Sapporo Olympics sets from Equatorial Guinea are valuable -- Michel #89-97 and the imperf set (#A89-#A97), for example, routinely sell for over $500/set, when they appear anyway. These are among the key Olympics topical issues, only a little cheaper than the 1896 Greece set and quite a bit scarcer.

The "wallpaper" issues of Equatorial Guinea from 1972-1979 should be divided into two groups: the issues that the Equatorial Guinea government did authorize, and the bogus issues that stamp dealers (Clive Feigenbaum, mainly) printed in their basements and sold in bulk. It's pretty easy to tell the difference: Clive's creations have inscriptions in English instead of Spanish, and often are denominated in pesetas instead of the correct bipkwele. (A few of Clive's bogus issues made it into Michel at first despite those dead giveaways, for which I'll never stop teasing the editors.) Clive was also responsible for many, many bogus "stamps" from Staffa, Nagaland, Dhufar, Eritrea, the "State of Oman", and numerous others.

Although the wallpaper era includes some of the tackiest issues imaginable (the 1972 Space Disasters set, Michel #190-196, gets my vote for poorest taste stamps of all time; the high value in the set features the vacuum-burned corpses of the Soyuz 11 crew), post-1979 Equatorial Guinea has been a very conservative stamp issuer and its issues since have largely reflected the history and culture of the nation. The country's stamps in general are underrated, because of the excesses of the Francisco Nguema era.

I would like to thank each one who has spent a considerable amount of time in answering my question. At least I don't have any regrets about the bogus stamps, since they were given to me.

I only have a couple of the Sapporo Olympics stamps. Are they valuable singly too?

Only the ones made out of foil are valuable; the regular paper ones are very common. The gold foil issues are scarce enough that even singles would sell for some money. Ideally you want the presentation folder that the foil stamps came in, too, but they sell well even without the folder. There were only 1,000 sets IIRC issued in total, and retention wasn't as good as most modern issues.

There are a number of other gold foil issues from this country besides, which are less valuable but still worth having; keep your eyes open, a lot of collectors (and dealers!) in Anglophone countries just automatically toss anything Equatorial Guinea in the junk pile, so every now and then somebody scores a set as a "find".

DrewM wrote a very informative reply. I collect stamps with monkeys and apes and am regularly confronted with "wall paper" issues especially from African countries that each year it seems issue sets of such stamps, usually as part of a whole set of fauna stams - so you will have "monkeys", "lions", "elephants", etc. Or monkey stamps are part of "endangered species" sets. So what do you do? I tend to buy them because these days, they can be very attractive stamps. Some are even part of limited sets and numbered. I have given up on using Stanley Gibbon since they are just too expensive for aprivate person, and in Australia, libraries resists buying them for the same reason. However, I can get Michel electronically for a better price, and they do list these issues. OK, so their prices possibly are what the printers ask ... but at least I do get numbers for my private catalogue; and some issues actually increase in value. But in the end, it is really up to you what you want in your collection.

So I did get these, for instance:

I've got em all!

Question? Does anyone know who the printers were of the Equatorial Guinea "stamps" of 1972-1979? Not the Clive Feigenbaum noted above, but other group?

There was talk at a APS meeting at the St. Louis stamp show a few years back . About Scott Catalog issuing a seperate catalog for 1941 t0 1970 . Then dropping their extensive present system .

I wrote about that meeting here ,seems nothing has been discussed since . The issuing each year by most countries has already overwhelmed most worldwide collectors . It is a problem that keeps getting kicked down the road .

I believe the answer has already hit us ,when a set of catalogs have already past the $600.00 mark . Who will be buying a new set ?

I figured out after some research - "Filanumismatica Madrid" was the stamp agency responsible for much of the Equatorial Guinea issues of the 1970's. They also just happened to be the printers of a catalog for the stamps too.

As for Floortrader's question: Nope. Never will buy a new set. I am in the processing of updating my old 2006 set with a hybrid set of 2018/2019 issues via Abebooks (through 5 different sellers to get best prices - nuts...so far volumes 1AB, 2AB and 5A have arrived).

I mean, the main barrier in collecting the world is not the cost of obtaining catalogs. :)

I don't know many collectors that actually buy a new set of Scott catalogues every year. Scott could do what Michel does, and stagger catalog releases: say, a new Classic catalog every year, and every year one or two volumes of the general worldwide catalog, rotating through regions or the alphabet.