Oldest Venezuelan Catalogue of Venezuela Stamps

Any generalization is, by definition, wrong. including this one!

During the previous month I have been publishing old catalogues on Venezuelan stamps, printed around the world. In that series I included one printed in France, one in Germany and one in United States of America.

Today it is the turn of no less than Venezuela.

As I had said in one of the articles mentioned above, it is believed that the First Catalogue of Venezuelan Stamps printed in our country was that edited by Carlos Reyes Saldivia in 1915.

That’s not true. I had completely forgotten that in the Club Filatelico de Caracas Magazine #15, page 33 and following, dated January-February 1964, Eng. John Lampe Machado reviewed an old catalogue printed in Caracas in the Tipografía de T. Arredondo Betancourt & Cía approximately in 1893 and whose author was Aurelio Ferrer.

The catalogue is actually a price list, it is 16 pages long and was written in French. It shows no images. However, it includes some varieties and errors. They gave it the pompous name of:

Current Prices for
All Stamps of Venezuela
Issued from 1859 to 1893
with its different overprints, errors and perforations.

By Aurelio Ferrer

The Engineer Lampe had the wonderful idea of placing a photograph of each page, so we can clearly see what it looked like and what information it included.

Here it is..

As a bonus to the article, let me share with you a nice postal stationery sent by the author of the Catalogue, Aurelio Ferrer.