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Tidying up my stock the
other day, I came across these three stamps in a packet. I was about to add
them to a section of common 5r Dashnak Armenian overprints when I realised they were
not quite right. They are, in fact, overprinted centrally with a 3r handstamp
and its accompanying monogram above. So that suggests they are “counter
surcharges” – unofficial combinations of stamps and overprint done as a favour
to a collector or dealer. For Dashnak Armenia, Michel does not list these counter
surcharges but Gibbons does and so does Ceresa in his handbooks. Both are
following the listings in Tchilingirian and Ashford’s books ( now over sixty
years old).
But then I noticed something
else. On all three stamps, you can find part of a “5r” overprint above and to one side of
the 3r overprint. But you cannot find more than a trace of a 5r monogram. What
is going on?
I think this is a case
where a clerk may have made a genuine mistake and tried to correct it. So these
are corrected surcharges, not counter surcharges. To avoid the mess of two
monograms, he tilted the 5r handstamp so that the monogram does not print. But
this also meant that the 5r does not print properly either. On the dark
background, it’s not clear what has happened. Whatever has happened the reuslt is a mess and from a practical point of view, a failure.
All three stamps are
from the same sheet – they are all off-centre in the same way. All were signed by
Theodore Champion, a careful Paris dealer of the time, and all were later
signed RJC [ Dr Ceresa’s first handstamp]. But Ceresa does not list this
variety in his Armenia handbook. Perhaps he also put these stamps into a packet
and forgot about them.
These might have been failures as corrected surcharges for all but the clerk who sold them and cancelled them. Only he need know the correct value in order to make them valid for postage.
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