Home Calendar Membership Auctions TEXAS "Lynx"
In Riga on November 18, 1918, in the aftermath of World War I, Latvia declared independence. The German army still occupied Latvia, which had been part of Russia. As the Germans gradually withdrew from Latvia, the following Soviet Latvian troops were immediately reoccupying it.
With the war-induced shortage of paper in Latvia, the new Latvian
postal administration chose surplus German military maps for printing
their first stamps. The paper quality was excellent.
Latvians also used these maps to wrap fish in the Riga market.
The maps were unfinished; that is,
their backs were not printed and they were not trimmed to a smaller
size for folding. Previous literature has not noted this. The back of
finished maps were generally printed with the region name and scale
[RUSSLAND, 1:100 000] and map grid position and main town name, such
as S18. When folded into sixths, this
information appeared on the top of the map.
The
unfinished maps were in storage in Riga, the German military
headquarters for the region. Although the map series contained maps
of a large area east of Germany, these maps showed southern and
eastern Latvia and most of Lithuania. Some of the maps had become
obsolete when new editions replaced them; others were obsolete
because WWI was over. The map paper is a dark cream color.
The partial label is another possible source of stamp printing paper
stock.
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