El Salvador Handbook

I and several other collectors are working with Guillermo Gallegos, Director of Philately for the El Salvador Society on updating and finishing the El Salvador Handbook for the period from Pre-Philately through the issues of 1889. We plan to publish this section within the next year or sooner.

I am asking the readers of this blog to help us make the handbook more complete. If you, or anyone you know, have scans of any odd, unusual or rare items you/they would be willing to share with us, we can consider including it in the handbook. Of course, we would give you full credit unless you requested otherwise.

The handbook will be in full color and present the best up-to-date information we have.

We are also working on the Seebeck section and plan to publish that within a year of the appearance of the first section. In addition, we would appreciate any help you could give with this section.

If you do not have access to a scanner, you could send us color prints and we could scan and insert them.

I can be contacted at the address noted in my profile.

A Little Bit of Knowledge

I'm sure you all have heard the adage that “A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing.” Perhaps the following is an example of this.

You may have seen examples of the Honduras “1929 á 1930” issue with an inverted overprint being offered at greatly increased prices because the overprint on the stamp is inverted.

Although the decree authorizing this issue stated that the stamps were to be overprinted diagonally reading from lower left to upper right it was not followed. Except for the 5 centavos and 6 centavos stamps, which were printed in sheets of 50, all the other values were in sheets of 25. The printing was done at the Litografia Nacional at Tegucigalpa.

Shown here are two sheets of the 1 Peso stamp. The first example shows the overprint when the sheet was fed into the press correctly. The second sheet when it was fed inverted. If you look closely you will see that the “inverted” overprinted variety is actually more common than the non-inverted. There are 15 examples of the invert and only 10 of the non-invert on the sheet of 25.