ScottV Stamps

I bought a few bankers boxes full of inventory at the estate sale for a well known stamp dealer.   Lots probably got a bit mixed together as they were organizing the garage full of materially for private sale. One of the boxes I bought was a mixture of Greece, off paper.  It was about a half pound,  and i sorted through it mainly to split out older issues into a separate mix and remove any stamps from other countries.   About halfway through,  I found this one which caught my eye.   It's very old and it's a 10 drachma high value.  So I put that aside. I have been in the stamp biz for 40 years and I have seen most stamps hundreds of thousands of times.  Somehow my brain relent whether I have seen each stamp or not.  Here, it was like there was a glow around it.   I tend to visualize things with heat maps.   So a box of common junk would need cold,  but better stuff is mentally marked with a glow. ...

Whenever we take a road trip out to Phoenix, there's a long drag across the Mojave Desert on I-10.  At the halfway mark there is our favorite stop: Chiriaco Summit.  It has a gas station, diner, gift shop, and a holistic retreat of some kind.  The diner has a big shady patio with tables to sit at, and there used to be 8 to 10 cats there, curled up between flower pots and rocks.  We saw no cats this time -- or last time, now that I think about it -- and the lady at the diner said they don't come around anymore.  That's a shame, because it made it a more cozy spot to stop. There is also a post office. As we sat in the diner, we saw this old photo with a caption talking about how the PO was founded in 1953. We stopped at the actual post office to mail a postcard,  but it is only open a few hours a day on weekdays.  On a Saturday, we couldn't buy a stamp or get a postmark.  The gift shop was surprisingly large, but the PO is just a contract office wit...

On our trip back from Sedona, we got off the I-17 to see some of the back roads.   We tried to recall where we stayed on a trip 3-4 years ago and ended up in Lake Montezuma.  Sure enough,  there was a tiny strip mall with a post office across from a diner, across from the Beaver Creek Inn.  There was a nice little shady park, and since we were there on Halloween, there were events all day and people in costumes coming in and out. The building still says Post Office, but it was a holistic health place and a gift shop.  People said that the PO left years ago, and some online reviews suggest it closed down 5 years ago.   I just had this random quest in my mind where I would send some postcards from small post offices,  but this one fizzled out. It is still listed on many sites, but it looks like the nearest functional PO is up the road in Rimrock.

There were a lot of strange revenue stamps and unlisted items in the boxes of stamps I got recently.   Here is something I have never seen before: lock seal stamps. It looks like these stamps would be attached to a lock by the small hole at top and would be officially "used" by pushing a key through the seal into the lock. I looked online for more information.  Eric Jackson, the big revenues dealer, had some Google search hits, but none of these items currently in stock.  Over on stampcommunity.org:  "You can find more on the lock Seals in United States Internal Revenue Stamps Hydrometers, Lock Seals by J. Delano Bartlett and Walter W. Norton published in 1912, reprinted 1982."  And "Springer also lists lock seals". By Springer, they mean this one: " Springer's handbook of North American Cinderella stamps, including taxpaid revenues ": An interesting post about the history and future of that catalog . It looks like these date back to 1875.  A...

We had a sad day going down to Poway on 11/15 at the peak of a rainstorm to get to the final sale of the holdings of a well-known stamp dealer who died recently.  They did a good job organizing the 100+ boxes and albums, but it was a mixed batch emotionally.  We weren't close friends, but we saw each other at the stamp shows and I think I had come down to visit him twice at this very same house over the years, where he gave me a tour of his massive collection and the overflow that he brought out to the local shows.  I couldn't help but feel like a vulture swooping in, but on the other hand, we were converting the "stuff in the garage" into a financial gain for the family. About a dozen other buyers came and went during the ninety minutes we were there.  The rain was unrelenting.  The economics of collecting was on full display: if you want top dollar for an item you have to do all the work and wait until the right buyer comes along -- years later?? -- but if you...

There are a lot of creative ways for collectors to organize their collections and hoards.  Here is one I have not seen before in fifty years in the hobby. Someone made pages full of stamp-sized pockets using staples. While this can hold a fair number of stamps, you can't see the stamps, and it doesn't scale well.   What happens when just a few of the pockets start to overflow?  The big issue is that those staples are going start rusting... and that rust will leach into the paper around it,  ultimately causing little brown stains on the perfs of the stamps.  I have seen that small brown stains on perfs many times, but figure it's more likely caused by tape used to seal plastic mounts.  I have heard arguments that these kinds of stains can spread by contact to other paper items.  I don't know for sure.   These are cheap stamps and and I will be getting them off of these pages when I get the chance.