Help Locate Countries In Scotts Catalogue

Climber Steve made note of the IDENTIFIER in Scott catalogs above but I want to emphasize the point. The Identifier Section in the back of the Scott catalogs has photos and some text about lots of stamps that are hard to identify. You should spend a little time with it and start to identify Cyrillic, Greek, Chinese, Arabic, etc. . It will help in the long run. Also the don't forget the INDEX, it will often help.

The very first one (Kraljevina) : Kingdom of Serbs,Croats and Slovenes.


Colis/Collo : maybe parcel railway stamp from Belgium

Oesterr looks like it is part of Oesterreich = Austria

I've found that the Identifier isn't always great at finding dead countries...one of the reasons I acquired a 1956 Scott catalog. It's been helpful in finding names of countries that nobody seems to remember.

Linn's Stamp Identifier is another excellent resource.

For example (actual entries from book):

Oesterr. Post - Austria
Colis Postal - Belgium, St. Pierre & Miquelon or Tunisia parcel post
Postcollo - Belgium parcel post

Robert

Interesting to read all the above postings .

As a young boy who had a H.E.Harris worldwide album ,I knew all those countries and could I.D. almost any stamp just by the pictures in the album. By the time every kid who collected stamps got to high school we could tell you where each country was and something about it .To I.D. a stamp was just a part having a worldwide collection growing up.

GeoffHa already identified the "KUK" in the list as Austria/Bosnia, but to expand on that, "k.u.k." (or "k.k.") is an abbreviation of kaiserlich und königlich (imperial and royal), referring to the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary, which also administered Bosnia and Herzegovina. This also provides a time-frame for your catalog search, since those initials were only in use until 1918 — plus an additional year or two, to account for overprinted post-war issues.

To add to floortrader's comment above, when I was in the sixth grade, I gave a presentation to my class on how to identify stamps from foreign countries. After doing my whole song and dance with lots of names in strange languages and scripts scrawled all over the chalkboard, I finished by saying, "Or you can buy an H.E. Harris Stamp Finder for 50 cents."

Pretty neat little booklet. Mine is from 1974.

Robert

One of the first Books I ever Scanned when I began with collecting Stamps.
12 pages.
Inverted Jenny Sold $20,000