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Month: January 2017

What was the taxable transaction on this bond coupon?

What was the taxable transaction on this bond coupon?

Great aesthetics, but I’ve never seen revenue stamps affixed to individual bond coupons before. Redemption as part of the estate settlement? I’ve tried to find similar examples online, but to no avail. Thoughts? Response from revcollector (Bart Rosenberg): Since it is marked by the estate, it would appear that the original person to receive the money died so the money went to the heirs. That transfer is probably the reason for the tax. I have the 1898 laws put away…

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Argh matey! Shiver me timbers!

Argh matey! Shiver me timbers!

A new acquisition, one of the coolest revenue fancy cancels, part of a skull and crossbones on an R14c. Credit for the research on this one goes to Bruce Baryla: This ‘Skull and Bones’ handstamp was known to collectors of fancy handstamps by its appearance as a ‘sender’s mark’ on covers mailed in 1857 by the ‘Society of Twenty-Two,’ a Yale University based fraternal group associated with the famous Skull and Bones Society. This same handstamp was used years later…

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This 1868 revenue document hits all of the sweet spots!

This 1868 revenue document hits all of the sweet spots!

Purchased from an eBay seller in Germany, this is an R15c on an attractive foreign exchange with two vignettes from the European Exchange Office of C. F. Adae, a Cincinnati, Ohio banking house. Notice that all of the wording of the document is in German. Not only is there a German Prussian revenue stamp also affixed to the reverse (combination usages of both U.S. and non-U.S. revenue stamps on the same document from this era are quite scarce), but the…

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“One of these things is not like the other…”

“One of these things is not like the other…”

It’s interesting how differences between otherwise similar items don’t always present themselves until or unless you are looking at a group of those items. I was doing my normal eBay browsing, this time in stock certificates, and noticed what I saw to be an anomaly. Utilizing my Google-fu and compiling a library of images of similar certificates, it turns out it may be more rare than I initially thought. Then again, as we all know, rare doesn’t necessarily mean valuable…

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