Guthrum
27 Nov 2017
10:54:00am | 
By no means the most spectacular issue suggested by my dramatic thread-title, but rather the one that by chance concludes (completes would be entirely wrong) my collection of pre-war Soviet stamps, begun at the beginning of the year and now, with the unprepossessing surcharge shown above, finally exhausted.
It has not been an easy acquisition, both in terms of availability (I collect mint stamps only) and price - there are major gaps caused by both, but I have decided they can no longer be resolved.
'Cheap but unavailable' Soviet stamps include a raft of poorly-produced 1920s definitives (almost all sets of which feature a few which are far from cheap). Varieties of perforation or printing process are not always clearly signalled in my main online purchasing source, and so glaring gaps (for example, the three or four sets SG 345-400) will remain unfilled, and when the collection moves from the Hagner page to the album, unmarked.
Equally unmarked will have to be the majority of the 1934-1935 issues which, for reasons I have yet to fully understand, are inordinately expensive. It's not so much what I can afford, but rather what some parsimonious if irrational part of my psyche feels a set of three or four stamps is simply not worth.
This, then, will be a far from complete album, unlike its thematic predecessor (pre-war Third Reich), which omits only a couple of stamps and sheets. The next task (2018, I think) is to mount them up in my familiar style into an album.
A question: what if some Soviet sets already appear in another album (in this case 'The Stamps of Ivan Ivanovich Dubasov')? I do not feel like re-ordering a second set (parsimony again). My solution may well meet with disdain by SOR members, but I have to admit that I photocopy individual stamps of those sets and hinge them in the appropriate spaces, with a covering note below to explain that the real stamps are to be found in another album.
I hope that is not too heretical a solution, and would welcome better ideas from anyone who might also need two of the same set for separate albums, but is too fiscally tight to buy them both!
 7 Members
like this post.
Login to Like. |
