ScottV Stamps

Here is a strange item that my Dad found during his years of collecting.   At some point, afetr retiring to Arizona he found this copy of the $5 Calvin Coolidge stamp postmarked in, of all place, Coolidge AZ. The stamp itself is the high value of the classic 1938 Presidents set, and it's nice when it shows up in mixtures.  But it is always disappointing when I forget that it's not actually worth much.  The Scott catalog (2023) lists it at $3.  I guess it's not that uncommon.   The question is, how do we value this one with the obviously rare socked-on-the-nose matching postmark?  I figured I'd run it at $9.50 ... and it sold within hours. Postmarks are an odd area to try and collect.  The magazines run articles all the time about how interesting they are or how uncommon some postmarks can be, but there is never any info on how they affect the value of a stamp.  Personally, I will drop an extra $1 here and there for clear postmarks from places...

As a collector of postmarks, it has been sad seeing them get consolidated and trivialized in the modern era.  It used to be, every office had its own postmark and we could recognize exactly where the mail came from.  Sure, some of the early postmarks were just numbers, but for over a century there were clear town/date cancels with enough variety of design to make them collectible on their own. With computers came inkjet cancels, metered mail, vended postage labels and more.  And the postal services of many countries setup efficient networks of processing centers.  In Germany, they set up 99 of these "briefzentrums" (literally "brief" is mail and "zentrum" is center), and the postmarks went from thousands of towns and cities to just Briefzentrum 01 to Briefzentrum 99. I figured I would have to go to the Deutsche Post website to find some official document about exactly where the centers are, but this Wikipedia article beat me to it.  Not only does it have ...

It's always discouraging when you order some stamps from a seller and they take the time to use nice stamps as postage, only to have those stamps wrecked by the postal service.  If you buy stamp mixtures by the pound, the percent of stamps that are in fine, collectible condition is much lower than I recall from even 10 years ago. Here are some from Germany and Malta that got wrecked... The two biggest culprits are heavy, smudgy machine cancels and hand-scribbled pen markings.  The worst of the latter are when the postal worker uses a thick marker and ruins a whole line of stamps in under a second. I realize that the postal services need to protect their revenue stream, but if they also want to sell millions of $ of stamps to collectors each year, maybe they should at least act like what they're selling has value. Here's a case of a seller putting a lot of care into making a nice package, but someone at the post office just decided to turn it into crap.  Thanks ...

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...