H.R. Harmer to auction Frajola’s classic Nepal

By Michael Baadke

Material from the Richard Frajola collection of classic Nepal will be offered during an April 30 public auction.

H.R. Harmer will conduct the sale at Embassy Suites by Hilton Irvine, Orange County Airport, 2120 Main St., Irvine, Calif.

The auction features 137 lots ranging from stamps and postal history of the 1881-85 first period printings into the telegraphic period of 1917-30.

The first lot of this sale is a small folded letter from 1868 franked with India’s ½-anna blue stamp of the 1855 Queen Victoria design. The “NEPAUL 137” duplex cancel ties the stamp, and a “TOO LATE” boxed cancel on the reverse indicates the letter missed the daily mail from Kathmandu.

The starting bid for this artifact of the British post office in Nepal is $100.

Key among the items to be auctioned is a double-weight registered cover to Kathmandu with a paper pouch within. It is the only known use of Nepal’s 2-anna purple stamp with pin perforations (Scott 2) on cover, and also the only known multiple of any Nepal first printing stamp on cover.

The cover is franked with three 2a stamps (a single and a horizontal pair), plus the imperforate 1a blue (Scott 4), all paying the 7a fee for postage (2a) and registry (5a).

The cover was once part of the Gupta collection and the Armand E. Singer collection.

Describing it as “one of the great rarities of Southern Asian philately,” H.R. Harmer offers the cover with a starting bid of $20,000.

The auction lots can be viewed on the H.R. Harmer website at https://hrharmer.com. The downloadable PDF of the auction catalog includes

The Postage Stamps of Nepal A Catalog of the Classic Issues, 1881-1930 by Frajola and Frank Vignola, with information to help the collector understand the different stamp varieties, postal and telegraph cancels, postage rates and more.

Additional information about this auction can be found on the H.R. Harmer website, or contact H.R. Harmer, 2680 Walnut Ave., Suite AB, Tustin, CA 92780-7052.

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