ScottV Stamps

Often overlooked while we scramble to fill in spaces in our albums with gorgeous engraved and modern pictorial stamps, there are a few thousand designs of meter mail from around the world.  Here are a few samples from different countries showing the range of designs, from simple numeric placeholders to full slogan cancels that ran for limited periods of time.  I hesitate to call these "stamps" since they never had physical print runs, but they would definitely qualify as "imprints" of the master designs. Even here, you can specialize in countries, time periods, and topical items.  About half of these are airline advertisements.  That alone could keep a collector busy for a lifetime.  I suppose it would be most complete to collect these on covers where I could see the exact person or company these were mailed from or sent to, but I actually prefer the clippings: they take up less space and as I set aside the few I find in each new batch I sell, the quantity I gather

Here is a gallery of scans of War Ration Books. A lot of collectors have probably run into these, and they're interesting items. So I am including a scan of each book. Now -- the big question I always get: what are these things worth? Over a hundred million of each ration book were printed. Enough for everyone. As a result, the books generally sell for between $3 and $10 each, with higher prices for earlier books (Book One) with more stamps left inside. Book Two and Book Three are the most common, and fewer of their stamps were actually used, so they're more common with a lot of stamps remaining inside, and they get lower prices. The individual ration stamps from these books can't be worth more than a few cents each. However, there are some private, military and limited-run ration stamps that are considerably more valuable; I have never seen a complete catalog of these. And, of course, other countries have issued ration stamps during times of crisis. 

I bought hundreds of pounds of world mixtures back in the 1980s, and tucked away many clippings with full slogans.  Here is a selection from 1984-86 showing various town slogans, event slogans and general postal slogans, from my old website exhibit page. These can be conveniently collected by tucking them into manila stockpages.  I have no idea how many different varieties there are.  I have had hundreds of duplicates and sold various mixes of them over the years, and for a while I would keep the oldest and newest strike of each one.  But later on, I figured that one of each would be enough for me.  Somewhere there must be notices of each postmark going into service, but as a collector, I just want to see each design.

I have always been fascinated by the postmarks that appear on the millions of stamps I have seen over the years.  Sure, there are patterns and stars and slogans, but it's the heart of the postmark -- the town names and dates -- that fascinate me.  Each one represents a piece of mail sent from that exact place at that time, and while mail from big cities like Kobenhavn is common, so often there are small town cancels that I have never seen before and might not ever see again. For many years I ran a website called PostmarkShop.com where I listed thousands of individual postmarks along with mixtures of postmarks by country.  I had about 1500 items all nicely scanned and organized, but I don't think any one of those lots ever sold.  I recently broke down the stockbooks from that inventory one page at a time and listed them as mixtures over on hipstamp.com.  Here is a look at one of those pages. Normally, I number all of my lots sequentially, but in this case I had a binder full of

Here is an unusual example of India - Patiala #4a.  Normally the black and red overprints are offset by a millimeter or two, but here they are almost perfectly overlapping.  I had to do a double take and look at it under magnification to make sure my eyes were not playing tricks on me.  But yes, there are two overprints here.  

Some of my posts are just going to show unusual and interesting items I have handled over the years.  I finally sold a set of these in 2015. Those famous Bhutan stamps which are also vinyl records with chants on them. The collection I got this from had the original invoice included, these were only about $6 per set when they came out, now about $400.

I always enjoyed buying worldwide mixtures on or off paper and sorting them out.  My first sort of a big mixture is usually by first letter of the country name, but sometimes I simply sort by continent first.  Since I am fascinated with postmarks, I often keep a pile of those on the side.  When sorting A to Z, having 26 piles would take up too much space, but there are some first letters that are hardly used at all, so piles like D-E, J-K, N-O, P-Q, U-Z just happen naturally.  This will still fit in two lids of bankers boxes, four rows of three piles in each lid.  I have always had cats, so it's easy to stack the lids and put them in the closet if I don't finish the sort in the first sitting. There is a general economics of getting a general world mix at maybe $180 per 10 pounds and ending up with some smaller amounts of much less common mixes.  Country-specific mixes always cost more on the source price lists, so maybe an ounce of Japan might sell for $6, and a really odd mix

My Dad got me interested in stamps when I was 6, so this year marks officially 50 years in the hobby for me.  My very first job was helping a stamp dealer in Port Jefferson Station (NY) price stamps for his shop -- I got paid about $15 in catalog value per hour, my pick.  Perfect.     I would get to see things like this India States issue... I started a mail order mixture company when I was a senior in high school (1984) and it moved with me over the years from CT to NY to California.  I got on eBay in 1996 and their computer algorithm booted me off as I was gearing up for a 20th anniversary promotion (long story).  I'm sure I have gone through 1000 pounds of mixtures over the years, made 20,000 lots for sale, got my eBay ranking up to almost 10,000 so I had at least that many sales ... as well as cataloging hundreds of collections for Lee Clark Stamps over 20 years.  So, I have seen a few million stamps. I still have a significant stash tucked away for a rainy day.  The biggest at