Can someone explain this one to me? I picked up an attractive FDC of Paraguay's 1981 nudes series -- not particularly unusual, except that these are all stamped "MUESTRA" (SPECIMEN in Spanish). I was under the impression that specimen overprints rendered a stamp invalid as postage. But these are clearly cancelled officially, though probably with a CTO hand stamp.
This is not an official FDC. Those have official cachets and special pictorial cancels reading "primer dia de emision". Sets are often on more than one cover. Those aren't CTO cancels of the period, which are printed and are in a different style.
Finding a lot of this stuff WITHOUT the muestra overprint is a challenge. Not long ago Scott put out a call for non-muestra material to image for their catalog because scattered throughout are images WITH the overprint and they want to clean it up.
So, if they're listed in Scott and it's a legitimate cancel, the question remains -- are specimens allowed to be cancelled? This does a appear to be a philatelic usage, so maybe the better question is, can specimens be used to move mail?
Did these stamps - specimens or not - ever legitimately go through the mail? More generally, I could see a specimen stamp successfully negotiating a genuine mail system because nobody noticed it. In this case, I presume that the cancellation on the wallpaper was provided by the wallpaper manufacturers.
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Posted 04/21/2022 02:35 am
