ScottV Stamps

Here's a set that always brings back memories for me: Angola #362-381.  Here is a mint set that I am listing for the Philatelic Library soon.  The first few stamps in this set were some of the most iconic and common animal topicals when I was growing up.  Almost every starter packet of animals had these included.  100 different animals?  You will probably find the 5c leopard or stately 10c antelope, or the 20c elephant ... or all three of them.  Almost every starter collection I have seen since then that had only a handful of stamps from Angola would have a few of these. The graphics were really special for their time period: crisp and colorful and reasonably accurate portrayals of each animal.  Back then, every color plate had to be minutely aligned, and I don't recall having ever seen any color ink shifted or missing. I have a special fondness for this set, and always set aside the full sets when I find them.  They list for $10 to $12 dollars used.  Affordable.  And

This weekend, the local SANDIPEX stamp show had a calendar collision with a show in Orange County, so there were some empty tables.  Bob called me and asked if I could come down and help fill in.  It was going to be a lot of work.  Over the last two months, in the 1-2 hours a week of "spare time", I have been filling a bin with covers, filling another bin with mixtures, and getting some stacks of album pages into country folders.  But we only have Saturday and Sunday, then I have to somehow be rested before another full work week.   But he posted a nice blurb about me in the group newsletter, so we figured out a way to get down there, moving bins to Anne's place on Saturday (morning trip & evening trip), then doing some last organization there. We have a regular car, not a van or pickup like the other dealers, but my usual sense of how objects fill spaces came in handy.  Those two trips were planned as (1) a trunk full, and (2) a back seat full, so the whole mess fill

From the 1920s to 1950s, there were a lot of stamps showing factories with huge plumes of pollution.  This was most pronounced from Eastern Europe and Russia after WWII, where the workers were stylized and turned into icons, and industry was rampant. Here is a stamp from Saar (Scott #98) which is depressing every time I see it. The catalog says this is the Burbach Steelworks in Dillingen, Germany.  This stamp is high on my mental list of the ugliest stamps ever printed.  It's dark, low contrast, and badly over-inked.  The design is so bad, in fact, that you can't even read the printed value of 25c at the bottom, and it was almost immediately surcharged "5 FRANKEN". I was also wondering if those were dollar signs in the lower corners. The underlying stamp (#83) is the high value of a long set of blurry, smudgy grey/brown/black images of towns.  Here are some stamps from that set.  These usually have heavy, smudgy postmarks.  As someone who enjoys finding cancels fro

Selvage (US English) or Selvedge (British English) is the paper at the edge of sheets of stamps.  You will often see single stamps or blocks with this extra paper attached, and it is usually blank, but there are a lot of markings that can be found in these tiny scraps of extra paper.  Here is a pair of Sudan #35 with brown and blue registration marks and interesting brown bars.  Registration marks are used to make sure the different colored plates are aligned as precisely as possible.  I have worked in high-volume print shops, and remember grabbing a sheet every minute or so and checking the registration.  You would have to run the paper through the press once to print the brown ink, then dismount the brown plate and mount the blue plate, then feed the whole stack of paper back through and apply the blue ink, doing your best to keep everything lined up exactly.  There are many moving parts in an industrial printing press, and the plates do gradually shift.  If the marks start to ge

We stopped at Barnes & Noble to see if they had any of the expansions for Dog Park, but they did not.  There did have a new game called Penny Black ... really, a game with a stamp collecting theme in a major retail store.  I grabbed it, not even wondering at the price.  From the box size and weight I figured it would be $35-$40, but it was only $30. We tried it out on the patio after dinner, and it was different from anything else we have played in the last 100+ blog posts.  There was a mild annoyance at first, since there was a barcode on the box cover that said to click here to watch a video about how to play, but the page had no video.  It wasn't hard to find someone else doing the work for them , but really, if your barcode says X, you need to make sure that it goes to a page with X on it. The parts are all nice and solid, with a big bag of plastic stamp tiles and four cute albums to put those stamps into.  The stamps fall into four colors/denominations, and th

Here's the perfect follow-up to yesterday's post ... the very next stamp in the catalog.  Bremen #15. Germany Bremen #15 used – the classic 5-silbergroschen key design. 2021 catalog value $3750.00. A user posted some feedback about it: "This item looks to be yellow green. Also, the right edge has been trimmed and reperfed. I would suggest to have this item certified." Eagle eyes.  I would have to agree on the color, but I don't have specialist catalogs for this.  Well, I do have an old Michel specialized catalog, but the choice remains: post a generic Scott value that's up to date, or a more specific identification with a prices that's 25 years old.  As for the reperfed right else, it does look like the perfs are a bit too clean and shaped a bit differently. I'm not sure the reason we would pay $20 or $30 (or whatever it costs these days) to get a certificate that points out damage I didn't see when I looked at it.  I agree that these high-priced s