The stamp-like labels seemingly from "Isö Sverige" are completely unofficial and are usually categorized as "bogus" items. They are not postage stamps and they did not pay any postage service for the carriage of mail. That being said, their origin can be traced, in 1969, to a real place and there was originally some actual supposed real postal intent in the form of a "mail carriage service" to carry mail from a small island to the mainland, where Swedish postage was required to enter it into the Swedish postal system. The owner (?) of the island originally obtained permission (or at least instructions of now not to run afoul of the regulations and laws) to issue the labels. However, later persons / companies involved with the labels did not have that direct connection to the island and apparently did not follow the rules. Most of the labels seen on the market are from the early-mid 1970s, but items were produced, supposedly without authorization (bogus of a bogus) as late as the mid-1980s. An excellent and well-illustrated article on the subject, written by the very knowledgeable Swedish philatelist Christer Brunström, appeared in Issue 37 - January 3, 2014 - of StampNewsOnline.net. The article (in PDF form) can be viewed here. [If this link should cease to function, please inform me and I will provide an alternate way to view the article. If other comprehensive articles, or better yet, a catalog listing, are known, I would like to learn of them.]
To be clear, except perhaps for the very earliest issues, these labels were created purely to separate collectors from their money. At the same time, now 50 years later, there are collectors, fully understanding of the situation, who are interested in such items. The financial value of such items is probably only nominal, but for a dealer such as myself to offer them, I have to at least charge the cost of handling them. If you collect such items, please have fun, but I do NOT suggest that you spend much money on them. My interest in such items is simply to document then in an accessible, hopefully permanent, manner so that others can learn about them more easily. [Due to limited time, I am NOT actively seeking images of these labels for website reference use, but I would be interested in buying groups of them.]
To my knowledge, some of the "issues" were printed in "mint" and/or "canceled" forms. Other than "canceled" examples on so-called first day covers, most of the "canceled" stamps have a printed, not struck "cancellation" such that the "cancellation is always in the same position on the item. |
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