Tuesday, August 30, 2011

To be or not to be : CTO - The difficult ones 04 d


Like all good 'never-ending' stories, this one continues.

Some time ago I received a very nice letter from someone in Slovenia.
Seeing the envelop with very nice odd shaped stamps made my heart jump.
Unfortunatly when I opened the letter, i only found CTO cancelled stamps.

They are all very nice, good quality stamps.
But the fact that they were just cancelled for philatelistic purpose only, and never had been used for sending letters, made me sad.
All stamps and sheets are still where they were when I received them... In the envelop.
Despite the effort this person did to send me a nice collection of stamps, it was not at all what I m collecting.

This often leads to discussions in swapping.
One presumes (s)he sends a nice collection of cancelled stamps, the other person can 't use any of the items in the collection. Then the first person gets angry because the sending was 'valuable' and swapping stops.


Slovenia CTO stamps and souvenir sheets

Another European country, known for high quality engraved stamps.... Austria.
You wouldn't expect it, but they have CTO as well.
Some examples who didn't make it to my collection, although clearly, nearly perfect cancelled.
Sorry... for me, return to sender ...


.... maybe it's me...
maybe I'm to difficult...
or not ?

2 comments:

Stamp Raider said...

a lot of people share your thoughts. I once sent a pack of 100 used world wide and he sent me 50 CTOs in return!

rainbowstampsandcoins.blogspot.com said...

Hi Laura,
thing is, sometimes people are really convinced that they send you nicely cancelled stamps in return.
Indeed there are only few really postally used stamps that are cancelled that nicely.
The purpose of a stamp is still to be used on a letter or card, in order to pay for a sending to someone else. That's what it's all about.