ScottV Stamps

From the 1920s to 1950s, there were a lot of stamps showing factories with huge plumes of pollution.  This was most pronounced from Eastern Europe and Russia after WWII, where the workers were stylized and turned into icons, and industry was rampant. Here is a stamp from Saar (Scott #98) which is depressing every time I see it. The catalog says this is the Burbach Steelworks in Dillingen, Germany.  This stamp is high on my mental list of the ugliest stamps ever printed.  It's dark, low contrast, and badly over-inked.  The design is so bad, in fact, that you can't even read the printed value of 25c at the bottom, and it was almost immediately surcharged "5 FRANKEN". I was also wondering if those were dollar signs in the lower corners. The underlying stamp (#83) is the high value of a long set of blurry, smudgy grey/brown/black images of towns.  Here are some stamps from that set.  These usually have heavy, smudgy postmarks.  As someone who enjoys fin...

Selvage (US English) or Selvedge (British English) is the paper at the edge of sheets of stamps.  You will often see single stamps or blocks with this extra paper attached, and it is usually blank, but there are a lot of markings that can be found in these tiny scraps of extra paper.  Here is a pair of Sudan #35 with brown and blue registration marks and interesting brown bars.  Registration marks are used to make sure the different colored plates are aligned as precisely as possible.  I have worked in high-volume print shops, and remember grabbing a sheet every minute or so and checking the registration.  You would have to run the paper through the press once to print the brown ink, then dismount the brown plate and mount the blue plate, then feed the whole stack of paper back through and apply the blue ink, doing your best to keep everything lined up exactly.  There are many moving parts in an industrial printing press, and the plates do gradually shi...

We stopped at Barnes & Noble to see if they had any of the expansions for Dog Park, but they did not.  There did have a new game called Penny Black ... really, a game with a stamp collecting theme in a major retail store.  I grabbed it, not even wondering at the price.  From the box size and weight I figured it would be $35-$40, but it was only $30. We tried it out on the patio after dinner, and it was different from anything else we have played in the last 100+ blog posts.  There was a mild annoyance at first, since there was a barcode on the box cover that said to click here to watch a video about how to play, but the page had no video.  It wasn't hard to find someone else doing the work for them , but really, if your barcode says X, you need to make sure that it goes to a page with X on it. The parts are all nice and solid, with a big bag of plastic stamp tiles and four cute albums to put those stamps into.  The stamps fall into four col...

Here's the perfect follow-up to yesterday's post ... the very next stamp in the catalog.  Bremen #15. Germany Bremen #15 used – the classic 5-silbergroschen key design. 2021 catalog value $3750.00. A user posted some feedback about it: "This item looks to be yellow green. Also, the right edge has been trimmed and reperfed. I would suggest to have this item certified." Eagle eyes.  I would have to agree on the color, but I don't have specialist catalogs for this.  Well, I do have an old Michel specialized catalog, but the choice remains: post a generic Scott value that's up to date, or a more specific identification with a prices that's 25 years old.  As for the reperfed right else, it does look like the perfs are a bit too clean and shaped a bit differently. I'm not sure the reason we would pay $20 or $30 (or whatever it costs these days) to get a certificate that points out damage I didn't see when I looked at it.  I agree that these high-priced s...

Here is a stamp I've only seen a few times before.  Germany Bremen #14 used – the classic 10gr key design. This one has straight edges at bottom and right, but that's probably how the sheets were cut, notice the black guidelines.  A fine impression, and with a (2021) catalog value $1125.00, it was a nice find. Like usual, I have no way of expertising it, proving that it is genuine, without paying the usual one or two companies, expecting a negative outcome.  For now, I can just enjoy the image.  

The Postal History Foundation has a lot of mixtures available.  They always have off paper world mixes for about $40 per pound, and the volunteer asked me if I wanted larger stamps or smaller ones.  At one glance, I knew I wanted the smaller ones.  Instead of pretty topicals, the smaller mix had older stamps, and way more of them per pound, not to mention how many postmarks I expect to find. I had a few nights to fiddle with them in hotel rooms, and picked some countries or groupings that had good quantities, like early Belgium, early Poland, pre-war Japan, Germany AMG, Germany Reichspost, and postmarks, of course.  I soon had enough Belgium that I could split out some specialty batches: railways, precancels, early issues with tabs, even a few of the "-10%" variants. Here's a shot of the mixes back at home. I started sorting them by first letter, with a quart baggie for each letter (although some letters like D-E and K-L never have huge amounts, so they can go togeth...

4/15/2024: We stopped at the Postal History Foundation in Tucson.  I had not been there in about 12 years. They're still going strong, with a whole museum and educational area, tons to do, endless stamps to support and buy, and a world class research library with about 30,000 volumes.  They have many shelves of lots ready to buy, from pound mixes to individual stamps, bins of 10c covers, you name it.  For the rest of our 6-day trip, I had the urge to go back and help sort stamps, or buy more stamps to sort at home.