Millard's Revenue Stamps and Stamped Papers of the Princely States of India: Volume 3 B (Beri to Bussahir)

Victor Millard was educated in Durban and Cape Town. His professional life was spent in Broadcasting as a technician in Radio studios. He lives in Cape Town. He has always been a collector, a bibliophile, and a researcher. His first serious hobby was collecting shells which led to diving when SCUBA gear was available, and eventually, in the best traditions of the amateur scientist, to collecting and collating all available information on South African Mollusca from 1758. Small beginnings and a system of classification eventually saw publication and to Millard’s Classification of Mollusca: a classification of worldwide Mollusca which by 2008 was in its 5th edition. A survey of literature on Mollusca for the American Malacological Society in 2006 listed his 2003 edition as one of the important works that list molluscan taxa in systematic order. This work, of over 2000 pages plus index, is now in its 5th edition. A nascent interest in philately and in publications on philately was fuelled when he joined the Royal Philatelic Society of Cape Town; this took flight in an interest in its library and how best to make this resource meaningful to collectors and he began work on a search engine to enable worldwide access to 1000s of journals and books. As a publication’s copyright status allows this, the system ensures this. At the same time, he found an interest in Indian Revenue stamps – those of the princely states. Once found, it ignited. The classic reference to these issues - The Court Fee and Revenue Stamps of the Princely States of India Adolph Koeppel and Raymond D. Manners - in three volumes, which in 1989 won the Crawford Medal of the RPSL. was out of print, unaffordable, and by the 2020s, out-of-date, so he began collecting all information he could find on the subject, and, following the Koeppel & Manners (KM) system, he has produced a nine-volume alphabetical listing of The Revenue Stamps and Stamped Papers of The Princely States of India. An early and digital version won a gold medal in the literature section at the FIP International Stamp Show in Cape Town in 2022. Read more