published on The Cinderella Philatelist in 2004

THE CLASSIFICATION OF POSTAL ENTITIES

THE ‘ASFE’ APPROACH
By Aaron Maizlish

One collector’s attempt to create order in the world of cinderellas…

I collect postal authorities.  That is to say that I try to collect a set of stamps or a single specimen from every stamp issuing authority throughout history.  I assure you, this is a foolish pursuit.  There have been more than 15,000 different stamp issuing authorities throughout history – perhaps much more - depending on how one defines the term.  And there is no one comprehensive list of all of the producers of city posts, private posts, cinderellas, provisional overprints, etc.  Merely listing the authorities, much less finding the stamps, has proven to be a fascinatingly complex task.  Nonetheless, I have always been keenly interested in the geography of philately, and so I find the greatest excitement at the very margins of the hobby – such as private posts from Tierra Del Fuego, Bouvet Island, or the Tati Concessions.  

Since I started down this path six years ago, I have discovered a few dozen other collectors who collect in this manner.  We call it ASFE – for “A Stamp From Everywhere” – an acronym that was coined by Rick Scott in the 1970s.   Many ASFE collectors seem to be equally fascinated by making sense of their listings as they are in hunting down stamps.

The world of provisionals, locals, fantasies and cinderellas is a wonderfully complex world with no easy definitions.   One could be equally justified claiming 5,000 postal authorities  as they could 50,000.  There are some very large sets of “entities” that greatly impact this number: Do the Czechoslovakian liberation overprints count (there are 560 cities)?  How about individual railway stations in South Africa (976) and Australia (320)?  You might be tempted to hunt for every postal service from the 1971 mail strike in Great Britain, and every Boy Scout charity post, but surely you would not include every U.S. post office that issued a precancel (>20,000).  

To better explore this world (and to organize my collection) I have created a classification scheme for postal authorities.  The scheme demonstrates a hierarchical taxonomy of the various types of authority.  The complete scheme is printed in outline format following this article for your reference.

Why a classification scheme?  Taxonomies are an essential tool for conceptualizing large lists of data, especially where boundaries and interrelationships are murky.  Imagine the natural sciences without a hierarchical order of plants and animals.  Species might still be identified with binomial nomenclature, but their relationships would be non-observable to all but the specialist.

In fact, taxonomy is a very good analogy for postal authorities.  Biologists group living things into nesting bundles ( “taxa”) of varying size based on common characteristics and ancestry.  A species is assigned a Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family and Genus; groupings that are made mostly for practical (and heuristic) reasons.  These taxa elegantly describe natural sets but they do not necessarily represent a literal truth. Systematists today recognize that there are can be any number of natural sets of species (“clades”).

In the following table I grouped postal authorities into (mostly) four sizes of subset.  Continuing the taxonomic analogy: each postal authority is like a species in a discrete genus of like kinds:  the 1971 Postal Strike Emissions, the Imperial Russian Zemstvos.  This list breaks the “Kingdom” of postal authorities into a Phylum, Class, Order and Family, based on their common characteristic purpose and use.  

The world of locals, private posts, and provisionals can also be perceived as a descending continuum from the obviously postal (national posts) to the decidedly non-postal or non-stamp emissions.  Therefore, as a first order, I created eight ‘phyla’ that approximate a descending order of postal relevance.

1.	Recognized Government Issuing Authorities.
2.	Provisional Stamps and Overprints
3.	Local and Private Posts
4.	Common Carriers
5.	Bogus and Fantasy Posts
6.	Precancels and Controls
7.	Revenues
8.	Non-postals and cancellations

Government Authorities

An ASFE collection of course must begin with the internationally recognized government posts, which are found in all worldwide catalogs.  The first set are the active Authorities (the 190 members of the U.P.U. plus a handful), and their antecedents.

Even at this early stage in the list there is plenty grey area for the ASFE collector to contemplate.  Which events trigger the creation of a new entity?  Newly independent nations are of course different than their preceding colony.  Major name changes too signal a new entity (e.g. Dahomey to Benin); but how about minor changes (e.g. from Libyan United Kingdom to Libyan Kingdom to Libyan Arab Republic to Libyan Socialist People’s Arab Jamahirya?)  Reunifications (Germany) and mergers (the United Arab Republic) might create a new entity, but not minor annexations.  And how about spelling changes (Zil Eloigne Sesel to Zil Elwagne Sesel to Zill Elwannyen Sesel)?

After the Independents, I grouped together all dependencies, followed by all occupational authorities, a group that I call the sub-national authorities, and a group that I call the super-national authorities.  Together with official stamps, these classes sum up most of what may be found in the Scott catalog.   There are 1,500 –2,500 authorities in this first phylum; or much, much more if the collector chooses to recognize every change of government.  Sections 2 through 5 explore stamps that are often grouped together as locals.

Provisional Stamps

Provisionals are those overprints and occasionally stamps that are impermanent in nature, often as a function of war and liberation.  I divide the field into four classes; two based in war and two in peacetime. The first are locally-emitted wartime stamps, overprints, and postal tax issues; including such massive sets as Spanish Civil War locals, Czech and Manchurian Liberation Overprints, and 1944-45 German, French and Polish issues.  Second are propaganda issues, emitted by the various combatants and by governments in exile.  Third are non-wartime control marks of a temporary nature; these being overprints authorized by a central authority to control the local use of stamps.  Fourth is the massive class of locally hand-stamped overprints that occasionally occur at threshold events, such as at independence or following a currency change.  In these cases, the state has not conferred any additional authority on the local post office, merely authorized them to apply a handstamp onto stamp inventories.  It could be argued therefore that this class has more in common with the precancels and perfins found in Section 6, but because they are temporary overprints by nature, they have been included in Section 2.
 
Private and Local Posts

Private posts are by their nature difficult to group.  Their source of authority, their primary function, and their genuineness vary in great degree.  I generally elected to divide these locals into classes based on the nature of the service provided. 

Section 3.1 (on the table following the article) are the entities designed to provide local (or at least non-official) postal delivery.  Some of these are quasi-public, such as the rural Zemstvo posts.  The majority are private delivery services often referred to as city posts (including classic U.S. locals, Scandinavians byposts, and modern Dutch Stadsposts, New Zealand, Sweden and German private posts.)  In this class are also some exceptional types of locals – charity posts, college posts, strike posts, and expedition posts –which in all cases purport to deliver mail to the recipient.

Section 3.2 on the other hand are entities that purport to courier mail to the nearest post office.   By their nature this kind of local tends to be more philatelic in nature, although there are some gems, such as the 19th century Swiss hotel posts.  For the most part though, this class would include any number of modern local emissions that are deemed by the collector to have some merit (truly bogus posts occur later in the classification.)

Common Carriers

The next major group of local posts are those authorities that are organized around a mode of transport.  Railway, private air, ship, and bus posts have a common function that separates them from other private carriers. Common carriers include both letter posts and parcel services, because of the high degree of historic overlap.  Also I felt that private and local carriers have enough in common with state and parastatal rail authorities to be grouped together.  An important distinction must be made between railway letter posts (wherein the entity is a unique railway company) and what I term, Station Control Marks (wherein each entity is a station on a state railway service, such as in Australia, New Zealand, and R.S.A.)

Bogus and Fantasy Posts

Where local posts end and fantasy begins may be a rich subject for another article.  In my hierarchy I group all stamps with little or no postal merit as bogus, fantasy and art stamps.  Bogus stamps purport to have authority and to represent real places.  They include the classic forgeries and bogus private posts, confederate state fantasies, and so many post-Soviet “locals”, as well as the pervasive modern topical frauds.  Fantasies on the other hand represent make-believe governments and make-believe places, including classics such as Sedang and Atlantis, and modern fantasy states such as Occussi-Ambeno and Sealand.

The classification scheme goes on to include entities that are even more unequivocally non-postal in nature: art stamps, precancel and perfin control marks, revenues, unique frankings, and non-postal stamps.  With this classification in hand, a collector could delineate a more precise boundary on the limits of their collecting interest.  (For example, I collect from 1.0 through 5.1, with particular interest in 3.1, but not 2.4.)

As more collectors discover the world of philately beyond the mere accumulation of major country emissions, I hope that more will find interest in this geographic organization of posts.   The field of ASFE is a detailed map of the very margins of philatelic research.  Like the field of geography is to the social sciences, ASFE is a sort of inter-disciplinary synthesis of many aspects of philately.  For those interested in further pursuing this eccentric line of inquiry, I recommend two excellent collector websites that attempt to list all postal authorities:  Vagn Andersen’s ASFE site at http://www.asfe.dk and Zenonas Zebrauska’s Philatelic Geography site at http://www.kalnieciai.lt/zenius/. 
 
We are still finding many new local authorities in the margins of catalogs and philatelic literature, and we are still a long way from authoritatively describing the complete ASFE list.  
Thanks to Fabio V., David Sterling, Vagn Andersen and Christer Brunstrom for their comments on this article. 

END