ScottV Stamps

I was going through photos of some past road trips and found this piece at the Route 66 Museum in Kingman, Arizona.  We were there in November 2021, and there was a poster collage on the wall showing 250 postmarks from all along Route 66 and nearby landmarks.  The collector even got a postmark from Cadiz, CA on the last day of issue (29 Dec 1995), and the postmark for the 100th Anniversary of Supai AZ, the town at the bottom of the Grand Canyon where the mail can only be delivered by mule. The poster was accompanied by a lengthy news story.  The postmark art was created by Ken Turmel, a former postal worker who spent years and drove thousands of miles to gather all the postmarks shown.  The print was 2 feet by 3 feet in size and was available for sale.  Bill Clinton is said to own a copy, along with Reba McEntire and Moody Blues members Justin Hayward and Mike Pinder. Looking at it now, I wish I had taken the time to get better photos.  But I'm not here to ...

This is one of the strangest covers I've seen in 50 years of collecting.  It describes itself as a "unique art card" and it's packed with stamps from Egypt and facsimile stamps from other countries, handstamped with all kinds of religious and political slogans and other markings.  This item is about 8x10 inches on heavy card stock. On the front there's a facsimile stamp to save the monuments of Nubia, again with multiple markings.  Like a premonition of the many strange markings on the back, this one stamp was overprinted with "Worship God", "The End of the Begining" (sic) and "GOLD + WATER = PAY". Here's the back side:  Finally, a close-up of the address box: This huge card was sent by "the Bank of Arts, Philatelic Crusaders for Peace" in Alexandria, sponsored by Constantin St. Tsirimonis.  It's addressed to "the Honorable Walt Disney" at "Disneyland Park, Anaheim, Los Angeles, California, which is a ...

Going through the latest box of items, I found these two event covers that piqued my curiosity, as they happened right here in San Diego:  They were issued to mark the Last Day of Operation of the famous Coronado Ferry.  That last day was apparently 2 Aug 1969.  One cover was addressed and the other had a tiny newspaper clipping where the address should go.  Looking closer, that second cover had the full newspaper article from the local San Diego Union-Tribune.  All pages and columns of that article were included.  Here was the cover photo:    There were some interesting details mentioned: - The usual 25-cent pedestrian fee was being reduced to 10 cents until the last ferry trips were completed - The police and other authorities were supervising for safety reasons.  People has asked if they could host parties (no), and they had to stop people from riding back and forth all day to hog a spot on the last trip - "Anyone thinking of taking souven...

A lot of non-stamp items will turn up in boxes of stamps: postcards, paper money, coins, revenues, cinderellas, sometimes entire mortgage documents.  In the latest boxes, I came across something I had never seen before: a "Cedula Certificate" from the Philippines, from 1925.  Actually it was a batch of five of them from the same person, 1925 to 1937.  The ones I found all had a sort of ledger on the flip side, but those were all blank. Some research showed that these are community tax documents or residence tax forms that are actually used as a type of identification. That article has a good description of what the document could be used for: "When used as a primary form of identification, community tax certificates are used when someone acknowledges a document before a notary public, takes an oath of office or is appointed to a government position, receives a license or permit from a government authority, pays government taxes or fees, receives money from a public fund...

Here is a postmark I saw on one of my many scans, which led me on a fun search for information on a distant place.  The postmark is from a First Day Cover, cancelled at Signy Island, British Antarctic Territory.  I wondered where this was, whether anyone was actually stationed there, whether the mail ever touched the place.  I had a lot of questions. The British Antarctic Territory was formed on 3 March 1962, though of course Britain had earlier claims to much of the area, going back to 1908.  In philatelic terms, it formed from the Falkland Islands Dependencies and a huge wedge of Antarctica.  Signy Island would have been served at first by Falkland Islands stamps, then by the Dependency stamps overprinted for the South Orkney Islands.  These days, there is an "Antarctic Postman" who travels from Port Stanley in the Flakland Islands to the various bases.  In order to release new stamp issues, they must be carried one of the valid offices, after which ...

There is a fine discussion of the types of circular date stamps of New Zealand over on the Stamp Forum . The original poster DK gives the 7 types very succinctly.  With some notes of my own, these are: 'A' class or 'coin' cancel: I always called these "straight-line cancels" since the town name is in a straight line. 'B' class used mainly in the larger offices and by the military and other abnormal uses 'C' class is a basic circle often with inner part circle, DDMMYY with timsetamp 'F' class or 'squared circle' commonly used around the world 'G' class or 'concentric circle' introduced to Post Offices between 1894 to 1911 'H' class or 'English cancellation' introduced into NZ in the late 1890's.  Double outer circle, inner circle. 'J' class brought the introduction of the 'modern' Circular Date Stamp (CDS), similar to C but without the time stamp.   Now, I wonder if my big arc...

Here is an easily overlooked item: a blurry old stamp from Jammu & Kashmir.  At least, I think that's what it was.  There was so little of the actual impression of the stamp to identify. But it did have a nice clear postmark.  The local markings at the time were often just smudges themselves, so this clear mark caught my eye.  Looking more closely, whatever travels this piece of mail took, it was finally postmarked in MANCHESTER, England on 9 SEP 1876. So, while I can't identify the poorly printed stamp, at least I can say where it ended up ... in a lot of old India postmarks, filed away at my place.  

Continuing with the stockbook from last time, the next few pages said "Corner  Letters 240". So, this was another completed sequence, this time capturing all combinations of the letters in the corners, from AA to LT.  A few times in my life, when seeing a stack of these classic stamps, I briefly thought it would be fun to try and collect all those corner letters, but every time my brain said that's crazy, why would I do that to myself? Thousands of stamps had to be picked through to find all those different letter combinations.   I listed this collection also , and for 240 stamps that catalog $3 each, it was hard to figure a good starting price.  I went with $289, but I can always lower it later if there is no interest in the first few weeks.  There is no such thing as an exact price.  Maybe hundreds of collectors will click on it and grumble that I charged too much -- they clearly did not stop and think what was involved in putting this together....

At a private sale for a deceased local stamp dealer, we got another few cartons of albums.  This one was the find of the day: It was a thick stockbook full of Queen Victoria issues from Great Britain, mostly with clear numeric postmarks.  Nothing was selling at nearly the printed prices that day, those are what we might have paid if we found the dealer at a show.  There were a few hundred stamps, listing up to $50 each, but early Great Britain always feels overpriced to me and it was hard to say how the mostly heavy postmarks would affect any prices I tried.  Then there were about 8 pages of just penny reds (Scott #33), and my brain said it was worth a closer look.  There was a note at the top of one page saying "Plate 71 to 224" which is all the plate numbers except the expensive #225.  Sure enough, in tiny numbers in the side scrollwork, it had every plate number as far as I could tell.   I transferred them to 6 new stock pages.  Here is on...

Here is an odd collecting style I have seen a few times now: someone builds a collection of postmarks but trims them right through the stamps to fit into some fixed boxes on the page. I don't get it.  Yes, you are focusing on the postal marking, but the stamp is part of the usage.  I have seen other postmark collectors trim the envelopes all to some specific index-card size, to fit in a card file.  I always trim mine to about one or two millimeters from the edges of the stamp and markings -- they come out as a wide range of different sizes of paper, but it feels the most natural to me.  I recall distantly that the Postmark Collectors Club used to print the "official" rules for how to collect these.  Well, the PCC is still around and has a good introduction, saying you can collect them any way you like.

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...

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. 

At the Jerome Historical Museum in the old Douglas Mansion, they have a closet-sized exhibit of the old Jerome Post Office.   Here is the current PO, up the hill on Main Street. I was looking at photos from our 2019 trip, and the post office looked a lot worse for wear back then: I don't have much to add, just thought you would enjoy the pictures.

One of my favorite areas of postmarks to collect are the postmarks on Belgium railway stamps.  They are generally dark and socked-on-the-nose, to the point where they just looked like damaged stamps to most collectors.  And you can find large quantities easily. For a while, their classic ticket-shaped postmarks had some real ambiguity in the year.  This one looks like 1934: But it's really the hour (19) and two-digit year (34).  This one looks odd, as we know there were no postage stamps in the year 947, but "-947" is again the hour and year. If you could trust that this was always the case, you could figure this out at a glance: It would be hour 18, year (19)13.  But it's hard to be sure.  Because sometimes, the year does come first: (19)53, hour 16.  Why?  Pick a format and be consistent.  In case you're thinking it just changed over time, here's one from the same exact year AND hour, flip-flopped: I have no technical data or secrets to sha...