by A Taylor and H G White

One of the major supporting pillars of that Baroque edifice, Austrian Philately, is of course Klein - formally entitled "The Regular Postmarks of the Permanent Local Post Offices in the Austrian half of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy [Postal Obliterations and Other Cancellations on Austrian Stamps 1867, 1883 and 1890]" and reposing in our library as Item 31 Vols 1 & 2.

In 'Austria' 135 p6 I reviewed Erwin Rieger's long-heralded second edition of Volume 1, and remarked that there are to my knowledge five supplements to Klein’s original work. The first was issued as pages 481-486 of Volume 1 itself; similarly the second is pages 801-810 of volume 2. The third was printed in Die Briefmarke in March-June 1980, and the fourth also in Die Briefmarke in July 1997. A random check showed that these had all been included in the Rieger edition. However many of the additions printed in 'Austria' numbers 35 and 52 are not present. As these are fairly inaccessible, and fairly unreadable, I have merged them, deleted entries which now appear in Klein's second edition and a further 5 which now appear in Rieger's first supplement, and reproduced the resulting table here. Henry White introduced the original as follows:

The publication of any new major reference book naturally stimulates the readers to look, perhaps for the first time, at their holdings of the material listed mainly, of course, to assess and classify what they have and perhaps discover unsuspected varieties. Inevitably, also, even with such a major work as Wilhelm Klein's two volumes on the postmarks of 1867-1900, some unrecorded items are discovered. Whether the new finds are major eg a postmark type not previously seen from that town, puzzling eg a violet-black or bluish black ink instead of plain black, or perhaps just trivial, resulting from some petty human aberration such as turning some figures in the date upside down, omitting them altogether or putting the slug in wrong end first thus creating a 'block' instead of figures, is largely immaterial. Beauty and perhaps value lie in the eye of the beholder!

In the following tables, we start with the Klein town name and serial number, the descriptive code for the lettering of the postmark, its serial reference letter (invented and preceded by + if a completely new listing) and illustration number, the date used, and the stamp on which the mark has been found, where A = 1867 issue, B = 1883 issue, C1 = 1890 issue, C2 = 1891 (octagonal) issue (ANK 63-68), S = postal stationery, Z = Zeitung. 'invtd' = inverted [shown here by underlining]; 'trpd' = transposed; 'bi' = bilingual.

Not listed in Klein

Listed in Klein but not seen by him:

©Andy Taylor. Last updated 29 March 2006>