The Guadalajara provisionals were once described, by the late Bob Jones, as "bus transfers". Those of us that knew Bob were aware of his wry sense of humor and knew that his comment had nothing to do with the value or with his respect of the material. Next time you hold one in your hands, take a close look and see if you don't agree with Bob's observation. And the next time you take a bus trip, perhaps the memory of Bob Jones will bring a smile to your face.

The Guadalajara provisionals are classified in Scott by "printings". The 1st printing is described as "dated 1867" and they allocate Scott numbers 1 to 12 for this "printing". The 2nd printing is described as "dated 1867, no period after '2' or '4'", the 2nd printing was allocated Scott numbers 13 through 16. The 3rd printing is described as "dated 1867, capital "U" in "Un" on 1R and 1P, period after 2 and 4 and has Scott numbers 16A through 37. And the 4th printing is described as "dated 1868" and has Scott numbers 38 through 51.

There were various paper colors and textures used in the production for the Guadalajara provisionals. The paper colors were white, blue, gray blue, dark blue, green, dark green, rose and lilac. This is how they are described, but if one inspects the colors then the classification would not always accurately describe the color properly.

The paper was manufactured with various paper textures that are defined as medium wove, thin quadrille, thin laid batonné,  thin wove, laid and thin oblong quadrille. With a little study and some good reference pieces these paper types become easily recognizable.

Allthough the web is not a good medium for illustrating paper textures, we will try to illustrate the various paper colors. The colors are mostly pastels and take some getting used to, especially the white, lilac and rose. These three colors become difficult to discern because the aging of the paper from 1868 to now has taken its toll on the color. So one may be easily confused when discovering what they expect is a new "white paper variety", because the stamp should not exist in white, just to find that they are holding a faded lilac that has the appearance of white, in fact maybe it has changed to white. And of course white can easily be changed to appear to be virtually any color by dye transfer from any of a number of sources (intentionally or unintentionally).

The Guadalajara provisionals had a variety that is called serrate, referring to "serrated roulettes". Actually they were not really serrated roulettes because as applied they formed a round stamp. They appear as if someone had taken a Coke bottle top, laid it down on the paper and hammered the stamp out like a cookie cutter would be used to form cookies from rolled out dough. Some form of die cutting tool was employed to separate these stamps from the selvege but it is not known exactly what was used or how it was used. We have only the results which can be seen with the "serrate" examples of stamps in the following pages.

The image was placed on paper in the same manner that the eagles and Maximilian stamps were cancelled with Schatzkés #304. Since the eagles and Maxis were in use before the Gudalajara Provisionals one can see that the center of the cancel where the date was set, was removed and the denomination replaced the month and day. And because there were two lines of type for the Provisionals, instead of the three lines utilized for the month, day and year; the year is set slightly higher up on the Provisionals. In addition, the center information on the Provisionals (the denomination and year) are rotated counter clockwise by about 30 degrees.