ScottV Stamps

I went ahead and subscribed to the digital Scott's Stamp Catalog this year.  I have a set of 2021s that's getting pretty old, and we had been using the library's set of 2023s but we're returning those this weekend. The digital set is pricey at $549 for the year but it doesn't weigh 80 pounds and take up a whole shelf in the other room.   The physical copies are over $650 now and the next year starts coming out in March.   The digital catalog should update as the new volumes are published. I like the digital version a lot.  It's convenient having every volume on my tablet or laptop or the desktop in the office where we print orders from, wherever I need a price.   You can keep the main page open and click a volume to see all the countries.  Click any country and it loads the catalog pages for that country in a new tab.   Each country has a list of sections with an entry for the start,  #500, #1000 and so on.  So...

We got a lot of new material listed on Hipstamp and joined in on some of their holiday sale events.  First we ran a 20% discount for three days, then 30% off for Black Friday, each sale affecting over 3000 items. We were gearing up to ship a lot of items, but the actual outcome was disappointing.  We had less than $100 in sales across that entire spectrum of material.  Is there no way to actually sell collectibles anymore?  Every once-reliable market is so oversaturated with tens of millions of items, what can we do? To cap this off, we got sick for the whole Thanksgiving weekend, cough and fever and sore throats.  And on Thanksgiving, one user sent me about 75 offers ... almost all of them insultingly cheap.  When you set up a sale/promotion, there's a checkbox to turn off offers on the discounted items. On that 20% sale, I forgot to check that box.  So this flood of offers ended up like this: a $9 items is already discounted to $7, so this guy offere...

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...