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Barnebys HQ
Brahegatan 10
BOX 5038
114 37 Stockholm
All auctions / Postcards & Stamps / 17 Cape of Good Hope Triangular Stamps, 1853-1864 - 3 Unused
Southern Africa, Cape of Good Hope, British colonial administration. A group of seventeen triangular postage stamps from the Cape of Good Hope, the first stamps in the world issued in that arresting three-cornered format. The seated allegorical figure of Hope leans on an anchor at center, framed by the colony name and the denomination. The assembly comprises six red one penny, six blue four pence, four violet six pence, and one green one shilling, printed by line engraving on paper of the classic Perkins Bacon and later De La Rue eras. Three examples are unused, two of the four pence and one of the one penny; the remainder bear cancellations from colonial post offices. The triangular shape was chosen so that sorting clerks at the Cape could distinguish local mail at a glance, a practical solution that became one of philately's most recognizable designs. The Cape of Good Hope issued its first adhesive stamps on 1 September 1853, engraved and printed in London by Perkins Bacon from a design by the surveyor general Charles Bell. Bell's seated figure personifies Hope, the colony's namesake virtue, resting against an anchor with Table Mountain implied behind her. The triangle was a deliberate administrative device: postal clerks, many of them semi-literate in English, could identify Cape-origin mail by silhouette alone. Printing history gives the series its collecting depth. Perkins Bacon supplied the 1853 blue four pence and red one penny on hand-made blued paper, followed by white-paper printings; the six pence and one shilling values arrived in 1855 to 1858. In 1863 the contract passed to De La Rue, whose plates yield harder, coarser impressions distinguishable from the earlier work. A celebrated wartime episode produced the 1861 "woodblocks," crude typographed provisionals struck in Cape Town when a shipment failed to arrive, including the famous color errors. Careful plating, paper, and shade analysis by a specialist is the standard route to attributing individual examples within this family. Item # 199751
Estimate:$200
To the auctionView all items fromArtemis Fine ArtsorPostcards & Stamps
Estimate:
$200
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