Vintage Stamps

I love anything with vintage postage and when I saw these stamps, I snapped them up. I purchased them from an Ebay seller living in Croatia and the only thing in the listing was that the stamps were from Austria. After about 2 hours of searching the internet, I discovered that my stamps are not regular postage stamps, but tax revenue stamps and they date from the 1850's. These would have been put on a document to show the taxes were paid (on items such as tabacco or alcohol). I particularly like that they are black and white although some of them come with a pale green or pink tint. Every country had these revenue stamps and lots of them are very reasonably priced for collectors. The original documents with the stamps tend to be a little more expensive but still very affordable considering their age.

This next image is a French document from 1898 showing a revenue stamp on a document. I had purchased it awhile ago but never thought about the stamp on it since I bought it for the beautiful handwriting.