1898 Revenues: 1898 Battleship Proprietary Material: Harmer-Schau's January 28-30 Auction

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

1898 Battleship Proprietary Material: Harmer-Schau's January 28-30 Auction

Chris Harmer emailed to alert us to their upcoming end of January auction and several lots of 1898 proprietary material. You can find the web page with that material here:

1898 Material, Harmer-Schau January 28-30 Auction

Highlights include several scarce plate blocks including 1c and 5c hyphen hole blocks; several collections of company printed cancels, and two rare trial color proofs.

Above: RB24p plate imprint block of 8. I put up a copy of this block about a year ago on this site, but my copy looks like it was chewed by my cat. Nice to have a clean one to display. The opening, or current bid, is $290.

RB31p is one of the rarest of the hyphen hole plate imprint blocks. Last year a block of 12 sold for $1900 - that result was highligted on this site. The current or starting bid is $850.

This is a sample page of the McKesson and Robbins collection of printed cancels being auctioned. Four other company collections of printed cancels are also offered, including Potter Drug and Emerson Drug.

Two trial color proofs are offered in the sale, including the 1 7/8c example shown above and a 1/4c example.

Once we get the results for this sale we'll can see how the market is tracking for this kind of 1898 material.

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Unusual Ink on the 1898 Series Dollar Values

THESE STAMPS ARE BOTH SCOTT R191! From fugitive ink to color changelings with unknown origins. These are both copies of R191. Can only exposure to light produce the color changes you see in stamp on the right? Or possibly a soak in bleach or other chemical? I doubt it. These stamps have so many examples of changelings that there must be something else happening. The ink used on this dark green series of stamps was different than that known on any other BEP printed stamps, never mind the varnish square. It is likely the BEP was experimenting with ink on this issue. Inks are discussed further if you click on the stamps.

Collecting Cancels

Welcome to 1898 Revenues, a website that features the stamps used to pay the Spanish-American war taxes imposed by the US Government starting in July, 1898. But while this site features those stamps in general, a focus is on their cancels, and on the firms that applied them. Unlike US postage stamps, which were canceled by the US Post Office and now Postal Service, revenue stamps were ordered to be canceled by their users in such a way that the identity of the user and the date was included in the cancel. This makes the collecting possibilities nearly endless, so that a single variety of stamp, for example, the 2 cent battleship stamp intended to pay documentary taxes, had potentially millions of different users, and therefore as many different cancels. Please browse the site and discover the collecting possibilities, made so much more accessible now through online sales. Cancels on these stamps have become much more interesting and accessible with the massive amounts of archival and historical data available on line. Rather than hours spent in libraries or with heavy volumes to identify cancels, search engines allow for cancel sleuthing at home.

Battleship Proprietary Printed Cancels: Updating the Joyce/Chappell Lists

In the 1950s, Morton Dean Joyce updated a list of printed cancels on the battleship proprietaries compiled by Clarence Chappell. Joyce's is a very long list consisting of more than one hundred companies and thousands of cancel dates. In the years since Joyce completed his list, many new cancel dates have been demonstrated to exist, and an update of the 1950s list is needed.

This site is attempting that update. Using the Joyce/Chappell lists and the former collection of Henry Tolman (ARA #25) as a base, a gradual effort will be made to post updated lists to the best of my knowledge, making a call for those that can contribute new dates and new images of those cancels.

Following in this column are quick links to excel files of these lists by company. Also are links to the posts that I have made on this blog regarding these companies and their cancels.