Collecting postal history (2)

In an earlier posting I identified the criteria that might cause me to reject a country as a possible candidate for a postal history collection. It is now time to move on to consider in more detail those countries that haven’t been eliminated and then to put together a short list of possibilities.

South America – There doesn’t seem to have been much published on 20^th century postal rates and without this information “writing up” covers is almost impossible. Although it might be possible to locate Post Office Guides that would tabulate this data I assume they would have been written in Spanish or Portuguese neither of which I speak. On the plus side there is a reasonable quantity of material available and, I assume, relatively little competition for it since most of the auction lots I examined had attracted no bids.

Colonial Africa (the non-English speaking parts) – Information does exist on the postal history of French West Africa but I imagine that the quantity of mail coming out of these countries is relatively small which, to me, would imply that that anything other than the first-tier letter rate covers would be in short supply and highly prized (and priced). At least I do understand enough French.

Eastern Europe – Language is the main barrier here. Logic dictates that substantial quantities of 20^th century postal history must exist but without the skills required to decipher postal marking differentiating the common from the scarce and rare seems too big a challenge. It certainly isn't impossible that I might do a more detailed survey of what is available sometime in the future.

Scandinavia – I’m prepared to bet that somebody somewhere has published information on postal rates but again my poor language skills are a major barrier.