Post by mourningdoves on Dec 9, 2018 21:04:46 GMT -5
I finished enough of my Greek album pages to start up on that long-awaited project.
Once I'd sorted a fairly large stack of loose stamps, I made my first decision - to start off with the famous 1911-23 series. Here are a few representative values:
That decision soon proved to be a wrong one. That series was in fact two major series, one of which was engraved and one of which was lithographed. Of all the ways there are to identify stamps, for some reason that is one of the most difficult for me to parse. I do OK with perfs, I do OK with watermarks, and I try to keep a couple of good metric 6" rulers around at all times, so I do OK with measurements. (Colors are largely a matter of opinion as far as I can tell, so I try to take my best guess at how fading and toning has affected the stamp and wing it from there.)
But the fine line, so to speak, between lithographed and engraved stamps has some subtleties I can't pick out. Worse, both series, or subseries, could at any time be surcharged or overprinted - for a postal tax stamp, a stamp for use on one of the islands (I'd always thought that the Aegean and Ionian Islands have been Greek since Socrates was a kid, but no, they've been a madhouse of boundary disputes), a stamp for "New Greece" (territories grabbed during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire), and so on. If I make an error identifying one of the "base" stamps, it can trickle down into a spiderweb of false information.
I decided I just wasn't ready for that. I've hardly ever seen any Greek stamps, not even when I was young and idealistic; and I never thought hard about collecting them until (1) I saw a display of Hermes Heads at the 2016 New York show, and (2) I started collecting the Balkans in general, and Greece is in the Balkans, whether they want to be or not. So this is all new to me, and the 1911's - never mind the Hermes Heads! - will wait for a bit.
So I moved up to 1927.
That's more like it. Two printings and three plate varieties on the 1 drachma (a classy, inviting stamp that will be familiar to many of you), two printings and two plate varieties on a few others, and I can handle that.
While I was involved in all this, I became acquainted with the Karamitsos Catalog:
Friends, this has just become my favorite stamp catalog. It's quite bilingual, very well printed, and includes lengthy and fascinating essays that tell you why the stamps were printed and, if necessary, some historical background that will further explain the circumstances to those who don't know that much about modern Greece. It's absolutely stunning. Even Karamitsos couldn't solve my 1911 befuddlements, but he gave me at least some insights into everything I saw today. I'm definitely getting Volume 2, and I think I'll even get a current set just to help keep this catalog in business.
And I've seen enough already to know that Greek philately can keep me happily occupied for a long, long time.
Once I'd sorted a fairly large stack of loose stamps, I made my first decision - to start off with the famous 1911-23 series. Here are a few representative values:
That decision soon proved to be a wrong one. That series was in fact two major series, one of which was engraved and one of which was lithographed. Of all the ways there are to identify stamps, for some reason that is one of the most difficult for me to parse. I do OK with perfs, I do OK with watermarks, and I try to keep a couple of good metric 6" rulers around at all times, so I do OK with measurements. (Colors are largely a matter of opinion as far as I can tell, so I try to take my best guess at how fading and toning has affected the stamp and wing it from there.)
But the fine line, so to speak, between lithographed and engraved stamps has some subtleties I can't pick out. Worse, both series, or subseries, could at any time be surcharged or overprinted - for a postal tax stamp, a stamp for use on one of the islands (I'd always thought that the Aegean and Ionian Islands have been Greek since Socrates was a kid, but no, they've been a madhouse of boundary disputes), a stamp for "New Greece" (territories grabbed during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire), and so on. If I make an error identifying one of the "base" stamps, it can trickle down into a spiderweb of false information.
I decided I just wasn't ready for that. I've hardly ever seen any Greek stamps, not even when I was young and idealistic; and I never thought hard about collecting them until (1) I saw a display of Hermes Heads at the 2016 New York show, and (2) I started collecting the Balkans in general, and Greece is in the Balkans, whether they want to be or not. So this is all new to me, and the 1911's - never mind the Hermes Heads! - will wait for a bit.
So I moved up to 1927.
That's more like it. Two printings and three plate varieties on the 1 drachma (a classy, inviting stamp that will be familiar to many of you), two printings and two plate varieties on a few others, and I can handle that.
While I was involved in all this, I became acquainted with the Karamitsos Catalog:
Friends, this has just become my favorite stamp catalog. It's quite bilingual, very well printed, and includes lengthy and fascinating essays that tell you why the stamps were printed and, if necessary, some historical background that will further explain the circumstances to those who don't know that much about modern Greece. It's absolutely stunning. Even Karamitsos couldn't solve my 1911 befuddlements, but he gave me at least some insights into everything I saw today. I'm definitely getting Volume 2, and I think I'll even get a current set just to help keep this catalog in business.
And I've seen enough already to know that Greek philately can keep me happily occupied for a long, long time.