Italy Roma Mogadiscio: Cancelled To Order With No Gum - How To Determine It Is Not Postally Used

I recently obtained several stamps (different countries) that have no gum, and very neat cancels (as if they were CTO). Are these of any value (as used), or do they have any value at all? Here is a scan of 3 samples.




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CTO detracts from value.
CTO will not have been postally used because they were cancelled before use.

Was it your intention to ask how to determine if a stamp is CTO or postally used?

If the stamp is cancelled and has its original gum, the answer is clear.
CTO tends to be cancelled in the corner, so you can cancel four stamps with one strike.

Some stamps without gum come from first-day covers and will not have gum.
Like CTO stamps, they are less wanted than genuinely used examples.

Sometimes, you cannot tell other than by assessing wear due to use.

The almost identical strikes in almost the same positions on your stamps from a single set do suggest these were cancelled to order or soaked off a philatelic document. Considered individually, unless a specialist can recognise a cancellation that was not used on normal mail, there is no way of telling.

Three identical cancellations in the exact same place on each stamp are 99.9% likely to be CTO. They would sell like all other used stamps at a fraction of the used catalog price usually not with any penalty for being CTO, although some collectors who want genuinely used stamps (that have gone through the mail) might avoid them. However, I suspect the avoidance issue is more than balanced by the neatness of the cancellations on such stamps.

Must have been a pretty labour-intensive job. You'd need to separate the stamps from the sheet and cancel each one individually.

Spot the sign that is a forged (and not CTO) cancellation, as, probably, OP's is.

We may have discussed this particular issue a few years ago.

edit
OP's 4 lire stamp, almost without doubt, has a forged cancellation. It has been printed.

Seems to me that the order of cancellation, by hand, goes 4 lire, 8 lire, 10 lire with one charge of ink from the inkpad, So the 10 lire gets the lightest cancel.

Maybe this is actually done to order; any production line would have to deal with keeping the backs of the stamps clear of ink from whatever they used to support the stamps.

1. If you look at the cancellation of the 4 lire in OP's post, you will see it is made up of dots. That is a very clear sign it was printed and not hand-stamped with a stamp that got drier cancelling the 8 and 10, when there also are 1, 2, and 5 lire stamps. It is a fake.
The others also appear to be dotted, but they also are very weak. So, is it the weakness or are those dots?

2. The block posted with a railway cancellation has a very clear indication that the cancellation is fake.

And I am not even going into a railway cancellation on stamps that, primarily, received airmail cancellations. It is much more obvious than that.

In my opinion, we always have to look at the potential value difference, and then look a little further. Normally (but not always), a used stamp is worth much less than a mint or unused stamp. In this case, there is a significant value difference when used, so we should at first be suspicious.

Second, the placement of the cancellation is almost exact the same between all three stamps, so it is highly unlikely that they were postally used. At best they were CTO or favor cancelled.

Now, if favor or hand cancelled, one would expect some slight differences in the cancellation location, but, again, these are almost identical to one another. So I am now even more suspicious that they were postally used.

So, my vote is that these are fakes made in order to satisfy a need for used stamps. I would value them as the Mint price, less a factor if no gum or hinged. If it were offered to me, maybe US$6.00.

It should be noted that in some situations, like early Australia, there is a good market for CTO stamps and, in some cases, they are valued more than Mint or Used due to the confirmed supply of them.

Some small countries that derived income from world postage stamp sales, and saw little internal use of their postage, actually printed the cancel on the stamp for the convenience of packet-makers. So, it is sometimes not so clear what is fake and what is cancelled-to-order. For some countries the collecting public values them, others not so much.

And simetimes it is so blatantly obvious as with above block that was cancelled 21½ years before it was issued on 5 - XI - 1934

Has anyone noticed that Alfred E. Neuman appears to be on the bottom right stamp?!

You are right. That stamp has been manipulated.

You don't need to know the date of issue to be suspicious of a 1913 cancellation on a photogravure stamp!

Whenever a stamp has a significantly higher market value used than unused, all cancellations ought to be treated with suspicion, and neat cancellations are probably too suspicious to be tolerated. For me, in the light of NSK's observations about dots, the cancellations on revenue48's three stamps all look too suspicious to be tolerated even as CTO.

That is exactly what made me check the issue date. I think the earliest use was around that time, maybe a few years later, in Germany

If you mean when and what country issued the first photgravure stamp then the answer
is 1914 Bavaria

Yeah, sorry about that- was the only cancel I could find that said "Roma". The top left stamp's cancel is aligned with the cancel on the OP's example, and the bottom left's cancel would (I think) be unsatisfactory to sell to a collector. That's what makes me think the stamps were cancelled after being separated from the sheet.

These dots, are they Ben Days? Or inkjet? The imaging, the naturalistic representation of uneven application of ink, suggests a pretty sophisticated forger.