ScottV Stamps

An odd corner of the stamp world is the vended postage produced by computers, machines and meters.  Here is a batch from Switzerland, showing that they can have a variety of design or be plain ink on paper.   Also, as you can see from the "Jour d'Emission" postmarks, they get their own First Day markings.  I can't picture an actual ceremony to celebrate that yet another of these has been issued, but it does look like it's a thing. These are most often found imprinted with the current first class letter rate, in this case 90c, but other values are also common.  They can have any printed value at all (within reason), so I always wondered how you would collect these.  Do you only need one of each design or do you try to collect every value you can find, never knowing if other values are out there? They are also known as "machine stamps", " Variable value stamps ", "computer-vended postage labels", "ATM stamps" (because you coul...

Here is another little item I found at the show on Sunday.  It's not even a postal item, not a piece of mail at all.  It's an old New Year card.  The art from that era has a good sense of nostalgia.  But check out the little 1920 Christmas Seal at the bottom.  "Merry Christmas - Healthy New Year" That's not really what the seals are for -- they were meant to seal the envelopes.  But this is fine.  It adds to the art.  It's not just the front of the card.  The card opens and has the usual private family message inside.  A little bit of Americana. Oddly, we used to make our own custom holiday cards for family, and used to look for labels and bits of art and little seals just like this person did over a century ago.  But we're convinced that nobody cares about handmade cards anymore, so we stopped. I don't expect any of these items to have big value.  It's just fun going through thousands of ordinary items and finding the ones tha...

I have always had a fascination for the pages at the back of a stamp collection.  Those come after all the mass-produced pages where you fill in all the well-known things the catalogs say you should be able to find.  And back here you find the miscellany, the things the couldn't be found in catalogs, or odd little bits that the collector felt were worth saving along with whatever country they follow. One thing that comes up pretty regularly are registration labels.  Here is a batch from Australia that I just sold, a lot that had been sitting on various sites for about 15 years now.  These are all from the state of South Australia.  There is no indication of what year they were printed, but the very low numbers suggest early issues. Like postmarks, I suppose it would make more sense to collect these on complete covers, where you could see the full context of how and when they were used, but I have soaked hundreds of pounds of stamps over the years, I know that th...