1898 Revenues: Ebay: Proprietary Plate Strips

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Ebay: Proprietary Plate Strips

There is a lot of low denonmination 10-stamp wide plate strips currently for sale on Ebay through buy-it-now. From the pictures and description they appear to be all 1/8c RB20s and 5/8c Rb23s. The sale price is $595, way over what I would consider reasonable, but who knows, maybe there is a buyer out there.

See the Ebay lot by clicking here.

In the desciption the dealer writes in screaming capitals that some of the strips have inverted watermarks. David Thompson sent this comment by email about the dealer's watermark comments:

"...this dealer is making a big deal about the INVERTED WATERMARK! He calls this an error, this is no error, just normal production run handling, all stamps that have watermarks can have an inverted watermark, along with all different type of orientations, what seems to be the hardest to find is a normal watermark. Of course when you watermark a stamp you start off looking the back of the stamp, so you're already initially confused about the orientation, some people think a normal watermark should show."

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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.