Hinged And Cancelled Stamps With Gum Intact (Apart From The Hinge)

I recently bought a couple of items at an auction, it was a bulk lot with lots of various stuff and I was puzzled to find a couple of paper pages with cancelled stamps hinged on the paper, to discover that their gum is fully intact apart from the part where it is hinged. How is that possible?

By "intact gum" I mean that the back is very shiny when exposed to light and on minor humidity it is quite sticky. It is very even surface and when I compared it to couple of brand new MNH stamps I have, the gum looks exactly the same.

Known as "cancelled to order" (CTO) - produced for sale to collectors, rather than having seen genuine postal use.

That sounds reasonable, but shouldn't the cancellation mark be properly centered in that case? These seem fully random, some cancellations barely visible at all

Those are cancelled-to-order (CTO) stamps. A lot of postal authorities, especially those from 'socialist' countries, were used by the government to generate income in 'hard' currency by selling stamps to philatelists abroad. They wanted to be sure the stamps would never be used. Some philatelic bureaus provided the service of cancelling stamps. It also is popular among African countries and some agencies that are creating stamps for countries that are of a questionable, if not fraudulent nature.

If you search for CTO here, you will find discussions on the subject.

https://goscf.com/t/74458

It is quite common for those cancellations to be applied to four adjoining stamps, i.e., a quarter cancellation in a corner. More recently, stamps are printed with such cancellations. Many of the countries that did this were not at the forefront of technological development.

Unless someone has been playing 'Post Office' with mint stamps, CTO is the only explanation.

Genuine postal use is possible. The sender could have affixed a strip or block of stamps to a cover but moistened the gum of only two or three. Those keep other stamps in place, all of them are cancelled, and the recipient can successfully recover at least one with full gum and a cancellation. Obviously the likelihood of this succeeding is low, given the beating that most covers incur in going through processing, but it's possible.

Post clear scans of your stamps and we can do less guesswork.

CTO for sure

Posting a couple of pictures below. It is probably hard to see from the images, but the back of the stamps is very shiny (when angled specifically against light source). Also, someone was rude enough to use pencil on the back of the stamps...

Yes, now that we see the stamps, definitely CTO. It even looks like the bottom two stamps have cancellation ink residue on the back, as if sheets of stamps were cancelled and stacked on top of each other while the cancel ink was still wet.

There are other explanations for how stamps can retain full gum once used postally, but Yugoslavia is one of the countries where CTOs are prevalent, so that is the most logical explanation. The country printed many more stamps than could possibly be used by the local residents for mailing letters, and they made a good business selling "cancelled" copies to collectors.

The corner cancellations are very typical for CTO-stamps.

Lots of Eastern Bloc and African countries did this, specifically for collectors. I'm assuming there was a person with a hand stamp popping each page 4 stamps at a time, hence the random look.

There are canceled in the corner 1) not to mar the stamp, and 2) to allow one stamp to cancel four stamps.

Frequently (as in this case) the country sells stamps that they would not allow in their homeland. Such as nudes from strict Islamic countries. Or Disney from communist countries etc

Those tend to be fake stamps that were never authorised by those countries.