The Postal History and Stamps of Tuva
by Samuel M. Blekhman

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Book Reviews of The Postal History and Stamps of Tuva

Book Review: (Almost) everything there is to know about Tuvan stamps!
Summary: 3 Stars

If it had not been for Blekhman's enthusiasm for Tuvan stamps at a time when Tuva was the "ugly duckling" of the philatelic world, much extremely rare material would not have survived to be recorded for posterity. But the handbook does not stop with stamps. Postal stationary, postmarks, and history (especially postal history, naturally) are also dealt with in great detail.

Some of the illustrations (including the maps) were replaced in this translation with ones of better optical quality than in the original book; some footnotes have been added too, giving information that has come to light since Blekhman wrote his masterpiece in 1976 (yet more information can be found in the writings of F. Vanius in Filateliya magazine and elsewhere - but unfortunately it is in Russian) and also correcting a few typos and bloopers from the original text. A few of Blekhman's mistakes that I notice were NOT corrected, for those who are interested, are: p. 42, last line, should read "40 tugriks" (not "41 tugriks"); p. 43, last line, the cover arrived in HARBIN, not in Moscow; p. 44, stamp no. 11, the overprint is RED not black; p. 49, footnote 33 seems in reality to be a reference to footnote 42; and p. 92, stamp 140I is on YELLOWISH paper, not white. The Appendix, too, on p. 99, did not appear in the original; it is marred by 6 typographical errors in the Cyrillic text, and also by the unfortunate transposing of the English translation s of the third and fourth terms. Figure 43 (p. 41) helpfully includes the Mongolian digits missing from Blekhman's original figure.

While I am at it, I would like to mention that the last sentence of the first full paragraph on p. 34 ("The last use of this postmark was in November of 1942.") is not found in Blekhman's original text, but stems from Cronin's commentary. Also, I stumbled across a few unfortunate errors in translation: p. 42, 1st paragraph: last word should be HUES (or shades, or tints), not impressions; p. 44, stamps 13I and 14I are DOUBLE overprints, not inverted overprints; and p. 56, paragraph 3, line 1, should read "Sayany", not Sadna. As a final point of criticism, I have the feeling that the translation was not carefully checked, and was possibly done under deadline pressure. Perhaps some of these minor mistakes will be fixed when the book is reprinted.

All in all, this book is a very valuable contribution to the unjustly neglected field of Tuvan philately, and should find a place on the bookshelf of any interested person whose English is more fluent than his or her Russian.

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