Over the last 6 months I have purchased a very large amount of material from Bruce Baryla’s gold medal winning exhibit, The Civil War Sun Tax as he’s been breaking it down on eBay. I’m slowly but surely now making my way through processing and imaging the material. One of the lots I bought was a pair of Civil War CDVs containing two different stencil designs used by R.E. Merrifield of Shelby, Ohio. It goes perfectly along with a 3rd…
Sometimes you see a messy mountain of material that you just HAVE to have. The mess shown below is on its way to me. 6 volumes of U.S. and worldwide revenues, locals, cinderellas, cut squares, and other miscellany. It just keeps going… My assumption is that virtually all of the U.S. locals, newspaper stamps, and Confederates are fakes/reprints/facsimiles (actually, most of the newspaper stamps are printed as such). It’s definitely a “quantity over quality” lot, as at least amongst the…
I just got this one in the mail today, a very scarce R18c double transfer commonly referred to as ‘eggs north’, where the outlines of the numeral ovals are transposed to the north. There is also an ‘eggs west’ (which I am still looking for) although that DT is not as bold as this one. The second image is much higher resolution with the DT elements highlighted. It looks like there might also be something going on through the tops…
Pacific Mail steamship cancels are very sought after. You normally encounter them with 1-3 strikes of the cancel on a stamp. As a general rule, the more identifiable strikes on a stamp, the higher the market value. Also, the greater the visual contrast between cancel and stamp, the better. For example, since virtually all Pacfic Mail cancels are in blue ink, the examples on 2nd issue revenues and the $3 denominations of the 1st issue do not make as aesthetically…
I wanted to hold off posting about this one until it came back from the Philatelic Foundation. The vast majority of claimed R53a on the market are fakes, and there are even arguments that they all are, since there are no horizontal pairs known to exist. I’ve handled any number, both with and without certs, and very rarely do I encounter one that seems plausible. Well, at COMPEX I happened to be going through Gary Posner’s inventory and stumbled across…