Stamps of the Orange Free State

This section contains an electronic copy of Buckley and Marriott's Stamps of the Orange Free State. This is one of the standard texts; Volume 1 has long been out of print and unavailable, and volumes 2 and 3 are becoming hard to obtain. All three volumes are being included here. Currently, volume 1 is complete and the others are in progress. Bob Hisey's reecent amendments and additions have been woven into the text.The latter can be identified by text in blue.

I have also taken the opportunity of running a spell-checker over the text and corrected assorted errors that it found. There are still lingering errors (e.g. 'Mosely' is also spelt 'Moseley' and Mosley' in various places) and occasionally a letter confusion (e.g. between '0' and 'O') has escaped notice. The latter type of error is due to the OCR process and some 'escapees' are inevitable. I am gradually eliminating these as I find them. If you find something that I have missed, please let me know.

A note on illustrations:

In the printed volumes, some illustrations (particularly those of overprints) were reproduced at a fixed scale, e.g. 2x the size of the original. It has, unfortunately, not been possible to maintain this fixed scaling of the images. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, for volume 1 only, the input material was a photocopy of the printed book, where the scale was already incorrect.

Secondly, the physical size at which you (the reader) see an image on your screen is dependent on your own PC hardware. Size is primarily governed by the resolution (in dots per inch/centimetre) of your monitor's tube but other factors such as the tube's shadow mask also come into play. To demonstrate, the commonest screen resolutions are 93 and 100 dots per inch (dpi) and an image 350 pixels wide would physically display 3.76 inches (95.6 mm) wide with the former resolution and 3.50 inches (88.9 mm) wide with the latter. It is, therefore, impossible to guarantee that an image is displayed with a given physical size.

In short - do not rely on measurements taken from screen displays of the illustrations.

Part 1 - The Republican Era 1854-1900

Part 2 - The British Occupation 1900


Part 3 - The Orange River Colony 1900-1913