According to Linn’s World Stamp Almanac a cinderella is a stamplike label that is not a postage stamp. Cinderellas include seals and bogus issues, as well as revenue stamps, local post issues and other similar items, per. However, a great many cinderella stamps are listed in Scott catalogues. Local postage stamps are stamps that were valid within a limited postal system.

Six stamps picturing King Alfonso XIII and Queen Victoria Eugenia were put on sale October 1, 1907 at the Madrid Industrial Exposition for financial support.  They were not valid for postage. 

Stamps were issued to publicize the Barcelona Philatelic Congress and EXPOSITION in 1929. Two postal tax stamps are listed in Scott as numbers 371-372. These were the only two listed of the several issues. The others are considered as promotional poster stamps.

The 1929 Barcelona International Exposition provided the pretext to urbanize a mountainous area and connect it to Barcelona. Nine million copies of these “Ayuntamiento de Barcelona” stamps were made of the first issue. Since then, new stamps were issued at Christmas, with some of the proceeds going to charity, a tradition that continued to 1950. Below are examples of local usage.

My stamp collecting interests? Wow, where do I begin? Like so many others of my vintage, I started collecting stamps back in 1950 or 1951 when I was in 4th or 5th grade in north St. Louis. There was no one in my family who collected stamps, but I had several friends in my class at school who did. In those days we all sent our nickels and dimes off in the mail to various stamp companies for those “wonderful offers” (with approvals, of course) that were advertised in the back of comic books and BOYS LIFE. I continued to collect sporadically until marriage and kids, and then I sold my stamps.

Ten or fifteen years ago I got interested in stamps again. I built a pretty good collection of Scouts on stamps, which I sold, Belgium, which I sold, and Denmark, which I also sold. Today my collecting interests are centered around the stamps and postal history of the Pontifical or Roman States, and the stamps and postal history of Vatican City up to the death of Pope John XXIII in 1963. I also have a small U.S. collection of stamps, souvenir sheets, covers and other ephemera from the International Philatelic Exhibitions that were held in this country in 1913, 1926, 1933 and 1947, and the same sort of material from the 1933 APS convention, the 1934 Trans-Mississippi Philatelic Exposition, and the 1937 meeting of the Society of Philatelic Americans. It is enough to keep me occupied, and mostly out of trouble.   (To be continued next month)

Phillip Schorr specializes part of his collection to Dead Countries. In this article Phil explain why collecting the Dead is a good idea.

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