Sunday, July 17, 2011

Collecting : My collection 01 g

In my search, to make a complete (?) list of all countries, territories, and states, ... that have issued stamps, I came up so far with 375 different entries, plus about 50 for UN and European themed issues.
However, there are many items in my books that are bogus, not recognised, only partially recognised, pure fantasy stamps, cinderellas, and so on.
Unfortunatly, the list of those "countries" is way longer then the real countries.
In most collections however, those 'fakes' are present, but luckily only as a minority.
However, collecting (or better 'keeping') those cinderellas, can be fun too. Especially to see what moves people to print and emit stamps.
Some were made just for fantasy only, some were made in order to draw the attention to their battle for independency, some are political inspired, to protest against a gouvernment, some are really intended to be sold as 'real' and to mislead buyers and collectors, some are intended to harm official postal services (as being emitted privatly, but with the same layout as the real stamps)...

In fact 'bogus' or 'fake' stamps are in a way interesting as well.
I have noticed that previous entries on bogus stamps are quite well visited, so why not give my list of those all...
(all means : all I found so far)

How this list is built :
I started to number this category with (0)8
second number is given to each different existing country the issue is related to.
(0)801.. = AI (Anguilla)
(0)802.. = AO (Angola)
(0)803.. = AQ (Antartic Region)
the last 2 numbers refer to each different emission of that 'region'

Quite a list, right?
Didn't expect it would be that long, right?

(0)86702 (ZA -South Africa) is the last country with bogus issues in the list,
from ZB (0)89101 on, we're really talking about fantasy items, labels, private issues and so on.
so the story goes on ...

Mark, the list might not be complete, for example, "East Timor" has been recognised recently.
However, there are many bogus issues emitted under the name of "East Timor", sames goes for a certain number of Russian states, who aren't recognised yet, or only by some countries. (or like East-Timor, who has non-official issues, before they became recognised (O'zbekistan, ...)
What about Libya, who has an 'old' and a 'new' regime... will there be 2 kinds of stamps in the future...
This might be a never ending list.

Help is welcome ;-)
All help if possible with a link to a website or a copy of the stamp (see my address)

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