EFO Postal Cards

Errors, Freaks, and Oddities are a popular area for mainstream stamp collectors. In the area of postal cards, this is one of my favorites, since many of the same types of production anomalies can be found here as well. As with many specialty collecting areas, EFO's are significantly more difficult to find on postal cards than with regular stamps! So too, the visual impact of some postal card EFO's is arguably more striking than their adhesive counterparts due to the larger medium with which to appreciate the result.

As with all EFO's, we have so-called 'Major Errors' as contrasted with 'Freak' items. The former are usually categorized to include production faults such as multiple, or missing impressions or tagging, printing on both sides, one or more colors missing, major color variants, press-print surcharge irregularities, etc. Items termed 'Freaks' broadly include anything else. These items, in general, do not enjoy any form of catalog listing. While this might be understandable from a practical perspective, I personally think that some 'Freaks' are just as rare and important as their 'Major Error' counterparts. Many Non-major error items yield insight into production methods used for postal cards in addition to illustrating what can possibly go wrong in this process. Major categories of 'Freaks' would include color shifts, legitimate miscuts, and noticeable printing anomalies, usually impacting the vignette portion of the design.

Miscuts are one area where the combination of uninformed collectors and the ease of philatelic contrivance has resulted in a significant number of cases where we find 'rare miscut errors' that are at best mis-identified, and at worst fraudulent curiosities. The Only legitimate postal card miscuts are those found on commemorative or other non-definitive issues which aren't generally available in full sheets to the public, and fold-over miscuts which exhibit marginal sheet markings normally trimmed in the postal card production process. Although anything else May be legitimate, the fact that anyone with access to full postal card sheets can fabricate 'errors' really renders these into the category of curiosities, or perhaps 'Oddities'.

Some collectors consider 'Oddities' to include flyspec printing flaws. In some cases, this may be debatable, but I think this really falls into the separate specialty of subject plating the press sheet layout, especially with the early issues. I consider oddities to include examples of card impressions or overprints on counting-sheet filler paper, paste-ups, minor offset printing flaws, paper-irregularities affecting cards, as well as unauthorized, or illegal usages of postal cards, such as cut-squares on regular letters.

With all things considered, EFO's on postal cards offer their own limitless collecting possibilities, but require perhaps even more patience than usual for one to assemble a nice representative collection of them.