SPECIMEN STAMPS

On the subject of specimen stamps, all member states of the Universal Postal Union were by treaty under obligation to send around 200 specimens of every new stamp issued to the UPU headquarters at Berne in order that the UPU could then distribute a sample of each to the member postal authorities. The idea being that the post offices of member states would be able to identify genuine stamps from spurious ones. These stamps were usually saved by the postal authorities in various ways and numerous archives have come on the market over the years and it is hard to believe now that even during the height of the second World War the stamp issues of Great Britain and Russia for example would have found their way, via neutral Berne, into the postal archives in Berlin. 'Specimen' UPU examples of the Victory issue of 1946 are frequently encountered but we have never seen anything after that so the process would appear to have been abandoned about the middle of the last century.