Sunday, February 12, 2012

To be or not to be : CTO - The dangerous ones 05 c

The obvious way for stamps to become CTO, is a genuine stamp that gets cancelled by officials, companies or postal services, to prevent they get used, or sold.
That sounds very logic.
Some CTO stamps are printed with cancel at the same moment the stamp itself gets printed.

But can it be the other way around too?
Can a CTO cancelled stamp become a genuine, postally used stamp again?
"No" seems to be the only logic answer, unless you remove the cancellation of course.
I don't know if that is technically possible, maybe it is, but that's not my cup of tea.

So can a CTO stamp still become a postally used one....
Well to my surprise my Malaysian friend helped me to solve that mistery!

Let's show a picture of a sheet I posted earlier :

CTO cancelled sheet from Malaysia
Back of the sheet, showing it's CTO cancelled
The letter I got from my friend K.M.

detail of the cancel
Now let's have a closer look at this postally used cancel.
There are a awful lot of cancels for just one corner, don't you agree...

First I marked the real cancels (highlighted in red) with the cancellation date underlined  18.1.12

real cancels

 Secondly a large cancellation in the middle, showing a date somewhere in April

Original CTO cancel (older then the postally used one)
As far as I know, the 'used' sheet was clearly cancelled to mask the original cancellation.
My friend told me that was the only way to get me such a sheet, postally used.
But since this cancel was made on demand of my friend, it becomes again a CTO, or not?

Anyhow, I'm very lucky to have this special sheet now, and thankful for the effort he made to get me the sheet.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

hi, I am John, the Chinese guy. Thank you very much for teaching me some special konwledge and you are a very nice guide.

rainbowstampsandcoins.blogspot.com said...

xie xie john, thanks for visiting my blog, hope i get more visits from China now :)