Orange Free State Philately Volume 1: The Republic and the Occupation 1854-1903 (Philately of Southern Africa)

This is a 2022 reprint of the 2002 opus Orange Free State Philately by Hisey and Bartshe. This is Volume 1 of their 3-volume set.The stamps of the Oranje Vry Staat/Orange Free State are an interesting subject for a philatelist for a number of reasons. First, it is a dead country, so it has a defined range. Second, even the most rare varieties are not as expensive as in other countries. Third, the country pursued a very conservative issuance policy. Fourth, the extensive range of overprints, all of postal necessity, provides an almost endless series of opportunities for study. Fifth, even though the country has been dead for almost a century, there are still large areas needing work and new discoveries yet to be made.The last handbook covering this subject is now some 50 years out of date, and much new information has been discovered in that time.Basically, until the mid-Twentieth Century, no one had a decent understanding of the complexity and interrelationship of the overprinting of the postage stamps, telegraph stamps and revenue stamps. All of these were overprinted in an order that made sense to the military, although it was a printer’s nightmare. This was elucidated by Laurence and then further by Buckley and Marriott. Some further development will be found in these volumes.A few notes on the illustrations are in order. Most of the stamp/overprint illustrations are given in twice life size for clarity. Some are actual scans, and others are tracings or drawings from actual scans, as seemed best. Most of the actual overprints show dirty type. The tracings are generally adjusted to show an outline somewhere between the true outline of the type and that of the actual dirty print, which varies considerably from stamp to stamp. Even if an illustration of the variety is shown in the text, it will be included in the general variety page for convenience of collectors.Keyed setting diagrams are used throughout. Although used earlier in other areas, thefirst application to O.V.S. philately was by the American Geldhof in his APS publication “Stamps of the Orange Free State” in 1938. This was taken up by Buckley and Marriott, who switched to using letters as the catalogs did. This has the advantage of conserving space in the diagrams, as it gives 52 single character keys instead of 9 or 10.An Appendix has a discussion of the printing methods and terms used by De La Rue, who were surface printers, and by Borckenhagen and Curling who used normal typeset printing. It is hoped that this may aid understanding of some of the complexities and behavior. Read more