1898 Revenues: 1898 Documentary Perfin Cancels

Sunday, February 26, 2023

1898 Documentary Perfin Cancels

Front Back

P & Co

Perfin cancel with initials and date. This is the most complex and interesting perfin cancel that I have seen on the 1898 revenue stamp series.

Perfins. For the unitiated, they serve to cancel stamps by punching small holes in the stamp that encode information. They are often used to precancel stamps. In a few cases on the 1898 revenue series, period size holes might spell out the initials of a brokerage firm. Perfins are somewhat scarce on the 1898 series of documentary stamps. They became a common form of cancel from 1914 on, and entire collections can be built on those perfined stamps. But today will highlight 1898 perfins. This post includes 3 unidentified perfins, 7 different NYSE firms, and 2 insurance companies.

Unidentified perfins:

P & Company (possibly Pearl & Co.)
FB... (possibly Finley Barrell & Co. or several others)
AN & Company

New York Stock Exhange firm perfins:

Price, McCormick & Company
Ladenburg, Thalmann Company
Edward Sweet & Company
DeCoppett & Company
DeCoppett & Doremus
Lazard Freres
P. J. Goodhart & Company

Insurance company perfins:

New York Life Insurance Company
Metropolitan Life Insurance Company

For the purpose of this article and in general, perfins do not include punch cancel initials or large punch outs, shaped or not. These types of cancels will be featured in a comprehensive post in the coming weeks. This post will also not cover generic perfins like those that spell out Cancelled or Paid, include only numbers, or are shapes.

The upper left stamp and the pair on the right are perfin style generic cancels, not specific to the user. Cancels in the same class include those that say PAID. The bottom left stamp has simple punch cancels, not perfins.

Letter punch cancel, not a perfin cancel

The first example, and the most complex type of perfin on the 1898s, is that shown at the top of this post. The cancel remains unidentified but possibly comes from the New York Stock Exchange firm Pearl & Company.

A similar type of cancel to that above was used by a firm with the initials FB; unfortunately this is only a fragment of the cancel and there may be additional initials we cannot see. It is clear, however, that firm initials and a date was encoded in the perfin cancel.

FB??

Finley Barrell (with a seat on NYSE) out of Chicago is a possibility, but there are other fims that might also be possible, including F. B. Cochran & Co. of New York.

AN & CO

A final unidentified cancel. This perfin uses an identical ampersand form as that for the firm Edward Sweet & Company below, so it might be a stock exchange firm, or a company based in New York.

The perfin using firms that follow have all been identified. They all used a simpler form of perfin that included only the initials of the firm and no date.

Price, McCormick & Company

Ladenburg, Thalman Company

Bill of exchange fragment. Dollar values are perfined.

Edward Sweet & Company

The old Scott catalog number is penciled on back

DeCoppet & Company

DeCoppet & Doremus

Lazard Freres

Bill of exchange fragment. Perfins on stamps 10 cents and up.

P. J. Goodhart & Company

The old Scott Catalog number is penciled on back.

New York Life Insurance Company

Metropolitan Life Insurance Company

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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.