Wednesday, August 18, 2010

The Worldwide Album Shootout: Mozambique Company


I have a real fondness for many of the Colonial African pictorials which I still remember from my childhood collection. Not surprisingly, several of the APS Circuits I receive are for such colonies.

While going through the latest circuit for Portuguese Colonies, I had the impression that the pages for the Mozambique Company in the Scott International were a real mess, i.e., a noticeable number of stamps in the circuit books didn't seem to be in the album. So many that I didn't bother to check the Scott Classics Catalogue and just made a mental note to do a thorough comparison at a convenient time in the future.

Last night was that convenient time but I can only conclude that I was under some stamp-induced hypnosis when going through the circuit books. In other words, the International's editor(s) did a good job.

While the Mozambique Company's issues are quite affordable, there still are some stamps that are more difficult to obtain than others. Scott has omitted a few high denominations--not that these are particularly expensive--as well as most of the overprints other than the "Republica" ones. Many of these overprints don't seem to be readily available from the "usual" sources I normally check so that may have been a good editorial decision.

This almost leads me to wonder if I'm remembering wrong and it was another Portuguese Colony that had so many missing stamps. But until the next Portuguese Circuit arrives and I hopefully pay more attention, it's Scott 1, Me 0.

For an overview of this country, see http://www.filatelia.fi/articles/mozambique.html. You can also view many of these stamps on Antonios Ra's collection website: http://mitch.seymourfamily.com/mward/collection/africa/mozambiqueco/mozambique.html.

One interesting piece of "Blue" trivia: the Mozambique Company quit issuing stamps in 1941 so Scott decided to include them in Volume 1 even though the album's coverage normally ends at 1940.

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