1898 Revenues: Ebay Listing: RB31p 5 Cent Proprietary Plate Block

Sunday, December 11, 2011

Ebay Listing: RB31p 5 Cent Proprietary Plate Block

Above and below:

For sale: Ebay listed 5 cent proprietary hyphen hole plate block.

Starting bid: $1,295

Buy it now: $2,795

Unlisted by Scott 3 years ago, the battleship plate blocks now have a place in the specialized catalog. No blocks are cheap; some are quite expensive and scarce. The copy above currently being sold by Steve Wittig on Ebay is an example of the expensive and scarce. He has set a starting bid over a thousand, and a buy it now for close to three thousand.

When the listing for this block first appeared in the 2010 specialized catalog, there was only a dash where a price should have been. Now in the 2012 catalog, instead of a dash, there is a price of $1750, though the price is in italics, indicating a lack of robust market information. What happened in the intervening 2 years? In April 2010, Siegel sold a plate block of 12 of this stamp for $1900. And sometime over the past 2 years a copy of this block for sale at Eric Jackson's website listed for $1500 was removed from his site. It must have had a buyer.

So there is some demand for these blocks out there, though I doubt we are quite ready to have anybody willing to pay the buy it now price on the Ebay lot above. Two years ago I wrote a full post on proprietary hyphen hole plate block values. Perhaps it is time to do it again.

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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.