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…
I’ve finished imaging the revenues I picked up this past weekend at COMPEX. No major finds but a few nice pieces. I did send 2 stamps that I bought on extension to the PF on Monday, and if they end up being good I’ll post them. The one item in particular is about the most aesthetically pleasing example of its type that a cancel collector will find, as the vast majority are found with manuscript cancels. So… on to the…
20th-century revenues used illegally as postage on covers are neat items, but as a general rule are not extremely scarce or valuable unless there is something extremely unusual about the cover or usage. Simple examples are usually $15-30 items. Well, last week on eBay I stumbled across a usage I’d never seen before: revenues used as postage dues. As Bart pointed out to me, it would not have been unusual for a post office to have revenue stamps on hand…
Just got these two in today. Both are exceptional pieces, in my opinion. The first is a very nice example of R17c (3-cent Playing Cards), which is fairly uncommon on a CDV. More importantly though, it is sound (most are not) and has wonderful deep color. The subject matter is military, which is always in demand. Second is a piece that I hemmed and hawed over buying, but ultimately decided I had to own. It is currently the only reported…
Tell me what you can about the item below. This image is the only piece of information you have, and it is at full size. If you saw this on eBay, how would you proceed? Giving you some spoiler space so as not to give it away… There was enough fuzziness around the edges of the stamp that it bothered me. Although the odds were very much against it, I thought it was worth checking out. I asked the seller…
I hope you’re insured… This is an insurance policy, along with the original advertising envelope it came in, from the Pennsylvania Mutual Horse Thief Detecting and Insurance Company, in York, Pennsylvania. (I love the thematically appropriate embossed seal!)
In December 2012, Robert Siegel held a multi-day auction containing, among other things, the collection and exhibit material of the late Steven Belasco. Hidden within that material was a lot containing 10 examples of one of the coolest philatelic items I’ve ever seen: presumably the first stock certificates ever issued for a U.S. stamp company, issued in 1866. I bid aggressively on the lot, but ultimately came up the underbidder. I was able to find out who outbid me and…
This past weekend was the first weekend of my Christmas vacation (I hadn’t had a chance to use more than 2-3 vacation days all year long, so I have a bunch to burn up). With nothing on the docket, and really feeling in a “philatelic mood” on the spur of the moment I decided to drive up to the ASDA show in Lombard, IL. I had not been to this venue before (Lindner Conference Center). The drive up was VERY…
I received these three stamps in the mail this week, one from eBay and the other two from an auction house. Each is unique in its own way. Two of the three are fairly common, at least according to the Scott catalog, but as is all too frequently the case, either the catalog is wrong (in my opinion) or there’s more to the story than just the catalog value. First is a lovely unused example of RB1c, the imperforate version…
Browsing through a junk box at CHICAGOPEX, I did a spit-take when I saw this stamp… absolutely HORRIFIC. But it was less than $10, so I bought it as a joke and showed it around, producing winces and cringing throughout the bourse. When I got it home, I put it up on eBay purely as a joke, but believe it or not it actually sold at a reasonable profit. The person who purchased it bought it as an experimentation project…
A new acquisition for my collection of U.S. revenues used as postage stamps; the first example I’ve seen on a leather postcard.
Looking through the PFSearch, one does occasionally encounter declined opinions rather than positive or negative opinions. They are comparatively few and far between, but they are out there. It got me thinking about the piece below. I purchased this as a fake and as a discussion piece a few months back, but the more I think about it, the more I think one could debate its merits… but ultimately, in my opinion we can never know what it actually is….
I had high hopes for this stamp being a major upgrade for my existing copy, but as happens all too frequently on eBay, it was not all that it was claimed to be. No faults were disclosed in the listing, and the listing photo was small enough that you really couldn’t tell for certain. When I made my offer, I included wording to the effect that the offer was contingent upon the stamp being completely sound. When I opened the…
You never know what you might catch on a subsequent examination of an item that you might have missed the first time (or in this case, first several times). I first saw the multiple below in a dealer’s inventory at INDYPEX back in 2008, and have seen it every year since. it is a block of 3 of R15, and the dealer correctly noted that the top left stamp is a T15 major double transfer. When I saw it on…
As part of my revenue collecting, I have been recently enjoying illegal usages of postage stamps as revenues on documents during the Civil War and Spanish American War periods. I’m up to about 25 documents now, including a few multiples, some combinations of different postage denominations, some with a postage stamp and a revenue, and even one with a demonetized 1851 postage stamp. They are more common than the reverse (revenues illegally used for postage on cover), but that actually…
1st issue plate number singles are fairly scarce and usually command large premiums. High-denomination plate number singles are even more scarce and rarely seen. A high-denomination plate number single still on document?… about as rare as rocking horse manure. Luckily for me, the seller of the document below didn’t use the terms “plate number”, “plate single”, “margin”, or “imprint” anywhere in the title or listing. In fact, they just listed it as a regular R97c. I guess this technically is…
I don’t know the behind-the-scenes goings on or what transpired with whom, but I’m not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. I’ll admit that I’m somewhat puzzled by the numbers. One of the holes I still needed to fill in my1st-3rd series revenue collection is R150a, the high denomination ($20) of the third issue, vermillion error of color. I’ve seen quite a few here and there but none that struck my fancy until this one appeared on…
File this under “Yes, I know it’s pricey, but I just HAD to have it!” I already have several examples of R5b with major double transfer (T5), but this is the first one I have ever seen where the R5b is imperforate vertically rather than horizontally. As with all of the pert perforates that can be found imperforate in both directions, the examples that are imperforate vertically are far more scarce than the examples imperforate horizontally. Add to that the…
Too bad. It would have been a very interesting piece. Also, it looks as if there was another stamp to the immediate left.
This is the first use of this particular stamp that I have ever seen in person, and searches of SAN and other auction sites only turn up 3 or 4 examples on document. I spotted it on eBay with about 24 hours left to go and it only had 1 bid at $5.99. The seller was unaware of the significance of the stamps, so there were no indicators in either the auction title or the listing. I was hopeful I…
This one had me doing a facepalm… for myself, the seller, and everyone else on eBay at the time this auction was going on. I was going through all my unfiled revenue “stuff” tonight, looking for 1st issue silk papers to add to my site, and as what usually happens as I’m pawing through piles of stuff, I come across a few items that I don’t ever remember purchasing. The picture below is a small portion of a giant 2ft…
Sometimes when I find revenue-related ephemera, I just have to buy it for the “neato” factor. Item #1. I wish I had seen these when the seller first started listing them, as I might have gotten the complete box intact, but by the time I saw the listing, several pairs of the tins had already been sold. I did, however, did end up with the outer containing box, which no one else got. These are very fragile. At some point…
In the world of cancel collecting, frequently the stamp that the cancel is on doesn’t factor into the overall scarcity or value. Take the R22c below. On its face, nothing that exceptional about the stamp itself, other than being a nice green shade of the fugitive violet ink. In this case, the cancel makes ALL the difference in the world. The stamp itself catalogs for $7.50. When the stamp appeared on eBay earlier this week with a $90.00 Buy-It-Now, I…
Before I get into the topic at hand, first let me preface my comments with: I fully realize that professional grading really isn’t widely accepted in revenue collecting circles; this was more of an exercise in curiosity, and When discussing the stamps shown below, I am concentrating on the margins only and not on other potential aspects of grading such as soundness, color, paper, etc. There appears to me to be somewhat of an illogical disconnect in the manner that…