5151SHARE YOUR COLLECITON! If you would like to have your collection featured here, e-mail: [email protected]
http://www.stampandcoin.co.uk JANUARY 2016^51to have been sold over post office counters and genuinely
used. The 5c is also the scarcest of the three inverts. There
are no known mint multiples of the 5c invert stamp and
the only used multiple recorded is just one solitary pair.
This usage on a cover is also the only one recorded.
A cover with a regular pair of 5c values to pay the
10c foreign letter rate sent from Guatemala City on 27
September, 1885 addressed to Oroomiah (Urmia) in
Persia with a Calais to Paris transit cds (25 October) and
a very bold Tabriz transit as well. On current maps Tabriz
is around 100 km south of the Armenian / Azerbaijan
border with Northern Iran, and Urmia is around 120 km
south west of Tabriz near the meeting point of the borders
of Iran, Turkey and Iraq. This is really such an unusual
destination from Guatemala in the pre-1900 period.
There are actually two recorded covers known to this
same address and I am privileged to currently own both
of them. They are addressed to a ‘Rev. B, Labaree’ and
one can only assume that he was involved in some kind of
missionary work at this date in time.Which item was most difficult to find?
This is another inverted centre variety. The dust jacket of
the Guatemala-1 handbook edited by Roland A. Goodman
and published by Robson Lowe Ltd in 1969 illustrated
multiples of the three inverted centre values. The used
pair of the 5c, a mint block of four of the 20c and a top
marginal imprint block of ten of the 2c showing the frame
plate number ‘2’ in the margin.
I managed to obtain the used 5c pair mentioned earlier
soon after I developed an interest in this issue and I also
came across a mint block of six of the 20c value but I was
unable to locate the imprint block of the 2c value. It had
last appeared in the Ricoy collection sold at a Christies
Robson Lowe auction in Zurich in November 1986
(lot 1585). This was, alas, a few years before I became
interested in these stamps and I would often wonder what
had happened to it. I was fairly certain that it was not
in a Guatemala collection and I firmly suspected that it
was sitting somewhere in a collection of inverted centres.
I diligently looked through endless sale catalogues which
featured rarities or inverted centres for almost twenty years
before it finally showed up hidden away in a thematic
style collection of material relating to the UPU!What advice would you give to fellow collectors?
Be patient. Rome was not built in a day and you should
not attempt to build your collection in too much of a
hurry either. It is always good to get a head start with a
collection by buying a decent starter lot for your chosen
country or subject matter. This is then something you
can build on but one of the great pleasures in philately
is researching and knowing your subject thoroughly
and making those important and often overlooked finds
to slowly assemble your own chosen masterpiece to set
before the judges at Stampex or whatever show you are
contemplating exhibiting at...5c inverted centre. The unique legitimate usage on cover20c inverted centre. The largest recorded multipleA rare ‘drop letter’ rate with a single 1c valuep50 Reader stamps.indd 51 23/11/2015 14:36