Is there a stamp that exists only as CTO (canceled to order)

Some reprints of GDR official stamps, which can be distinguished from the original issues in particular by the watermark, were produced with the CTO printed on them and were intended to be used to obtain foreign currency.

I have no specialist knowledge of fish stamps according to ATA lists and their CTO status...

I would take the statement regarding that specific CTO-only Bulgaria stamp with several grains of salt.

EDIT: see my correction to this post later in this thread

...I just looked at a few Eastern Countries......CCCP had a lot of CTOs, Czechoslovakia also and the list goes on if you check each Country in your WW collection.....Poland has some also - these slim corner cancels tell all !! Hungary is another one, as I am going through some Countries.......

From WIKI: Many of the countries that have issued CTO stamps are former Eastern European communist bloc nations, including Albania, East Germany, Hungary, Romania and Russia, as well as Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia.



René

The following additional information on this Bulgarian stamp and the differences in color and different years may be of interest:

For the 1979 Philaserdika stamp exhibition, series of identical stamps were issued in both 1978 and 1979, differing only in color and in the years 1979/1978 and 1979/1979.

Both issue dates were only a few weeks apart: the first of these series appeared on December 30, 1978, the second on January 30, 1979.

In the case of the stamp of interest here a mistake was made at the time (after all, both series were probably printed almost, if not completely, in parallel):

For the stamp intended for 30 January 1979 (1979/1979) in brown-carmine, which after all was identical in image to the stamp intended for 30 December (1979/1978) in blue, they did not take the correct printing plate (precisely 1979/1979) but the one for the earlier issue (1979/1978) and printed it in the color intended for 1979.

In the Michel catalog, this stamp is listed as misprint # 2738F in the correct color with the wrong year (or - as you prefer, and the Michel catalog obviously prefers - correct year and wrong color...).

In no case is it a reprint commissioned years later! The stamp was not intended for sale at all, but some issues remained - perhaps actually only as CTO.

Enclosed for additional illustration another motif of this series in the version for 1978 and the one for 1979 (here the wrong printing plate was not used for the correct color...)

Thank you for that. I was a little puzzled by the post elsewhere stating that 1979 set was reprinted 4 years later. It threw me off, and I ended up misreading the rest of the post. But that's still my bad.

In the USSR in particular, it was common practice in the 1940s and 1950s to reprint stamps years later. The distinction between original printing and reprinting is a science in itself. In theory, it could have been the same for the Bulgarian stamp. After all, many things were copied from the Soviet Union in the socialist countries. My examples of the CTO-only GDR service stamps are also reprints. But in the Bulgarian case it was a mistake.