Spain's 1945 Zaragoza Pro-Seminario Charity Labels

[I.M. DeBear]

These fancy charity labels were never affiliated with any postal service. They appear to support donations to a monastery, possibly for repairs. A certain Galvez catalogue does list them, but I don't own that book yet. If you do, a few comments here on cat#s would be much appreciated. Without it, I'll have to just go with what I've gleaned over the years, which unfortunately is very little.

Two sets are shown below, Galvez #1-7 and #8-13. I don't know how Galvez lists the perfs and inperfs, but I've found the perforated ones in either set to be a lot less common.

There also appear to be at least two paper types.

[I.M. DeBear]

Bold cancels in three different shapes were used on these two sets. As you'll see, they're probably not First Day cancels, as the dates are liberally scattered across the labels shown through almost all of 1945, from 06JAN1945 to 24DEC1945. It seems likely that favor cancelling was available upon request.

One of the nifty things about these labels is that you can collect the different cancels socked-on-the-nose, across a pair, or in the middle of a block-of-four. While this may be an interesting type of pursuit for many postage stamps, when it comes to labels it's a much less common option. I've found the socked-on-the-nose types to be the least encountered.

#1-4, singles with various 4-block cancels.

[I.M. DeBear]

#1-4, octagonal cancels on Imperforate Blocks-of-Four.

[I.M. DeBear]

#5, all three types of cancel on Imperforate Pairs.

[I.M. DeBear]

#6, all three types of cancel on Imperforate Pairs.

[I.M. DeBear]

Perforated #6 with socked-on-the-nose cancel.

[I.M. DeBear]

#7, Imperforate strip-of-six. All three cancels se-tenant on pairs with various dates. I've seen entire sheets cancelled in this manner.

[I.M. DeBear]

#8-11, singles with various cancels.

[I.M. DeBear]

#8-11, round cancels on Imperforate Blocks-of-Four.

[I.M. DeBear]

#12, all three types of cancel on Imperforate Pairs.

[I.M. DeBear]

#13, all three types of cancel on Imperforate Pairs.

[I.M. DeBear]

Imperforate #13 with socked-on-the-nose cancel.

[I.M. DeBear]

It's been merry fun chasing the three formats of the three cancels across twenty-six stamps, (all?) on two different papers. And the search goes on...