Bibliography: American Railway Transportation

American Railway Transportation
by Emory R. Johnson
1903, D. Appleton & Company, New York
-available used from sources like Ebay and Amazon


I found a nice little volume, published in 1903 but largely written during the 1898 tax years, that provides a wonderful source of information on some of the most frequent users of 1898 tax stamps, especially of the 1 cent documentary.

Dr. Emory Johnson covers the state of the railway business at the beginning of the 20th century, with chapters very relevant to the 1898 cancel collector including: 

Chapter 5:  The Present Railway System of the United States
Chapter 9:  The Freight Service
Chapter 11: The Express Service of the Railways

In brief: 

Chapter 5, on the railway system in the US, groups major railroads by region and ownership.  As far as utility to the collector, this was the first source I've found that explained to me the difference between the Pennsylvania Company and the Pennsylvania Railroad, both frequent users of documentary stamps.  The Penna Co and The PRR were parts of the same railroad company.  The PRR included the the system east of Pittsburgh, while The Penna Co. included the company's operations west of Pittsburgh.  The book is valuable for the maps of ownership groups. 

Chapter 9 on freight services discusses revenue stamp relevant subjects such as bills of lading and fast freight lines.

Chapter 11, on express companies,  is a short and clear explanation of the role and relationship between the express companies and railroads.  The major companies and their origins are included.  There is background material on the Adams, American, Pacific, Southern Expresses and more. 

Copies of this book can be found on Ebay or through Amazon, usually in the $10 to $20 range.

Riley's Fiscal Philatelic Literature Handbook

Kudos to the American Revenue Association, Bob Hohertz and all involved in getting a pdf version of this very useful bibliography of US revenue stamp literature on the ARA website.  You can download an electronic copy of this volume at the link below, or go to the ARA website and find the link there.

To quote the ARA site:

This publication appeared as the June 1997 issue of The American Revenuer. This index was compiled by R. F. Riley and contains a listing of over 11,500 articles about revenue stamps worldwide which have appeared in various periodicals. The listing extends back over 100 years and includes coverage of now defunct publications as well as many still publishing (such as The American Revenuer).

All entries are listed by key words which describe the country and the content of the article. Th is is part of an on-going work. This publication is extremely useful to any philatelist or dealer who needs to know what information has been written about revenue stamps.

The publication is now available as an Adobe Acrobat file and can be downloaded at no charge. It is searchable and can be used with Acrobat versions 7.0 and above. The file is large, 65.0 Mb, and download time may be considerable on slower Internet connections.

Link to Riley's Fiscal Philatelic Literature Handbook

This bibliography is a very helpful tool in the study of 1898 revenues.

New York Stock Brokers: King's Views of the New York Exchange, 1898

I have been searching for an online resource to help identify the cancels and users of the cancels on the majority of the dollar value commerce stamps from the 1898 revenue series.  Three days ago I found an ideal document for the purpose, King's Views of the New York Stock Exchange, which can be found online through the Columbia University Libraries Digital Collections.  The document can be read online or through a .pdf file that you download to your computer. 

King's Views of the New York Stock Exchange, 1897-1898 Edition

This book contains portraits of virtually all of the members of the New York Stock Exchange in 1897-98.  The members are identified as individuals and through their firms.  There are also photos of the interior rooms and trading floor of the Exchange in 1897, and photos of major buildings in the financial district of New York that housed important businesses in the financial industry.

If you download the .pdf file, Adobe Acrobat Reader enables one to search the entire document with a computer in seconds for complete names or partial names, like those that are often found on cancelled stamps that have been soaked off of their original documents. 

A typical page of headshots looks like this:

Headshot portraits from the book.  My 8 year old daughter asked if all of these gentlemen were the same person.  I suppose the greyscale, demeanor and facial hair of the subjects makes them all appear similar.  Except for one to know the reputation or more of someone like that at the upper left, one would never think these people to be the same.  J. Pierpont Morgan is at the upper left.  JP dominated US finance at the turn of the century.

This book does not answer all of my needs.  I am interested in the office addresses of each of these individuals and their firms.  I would like to be able to place their cancels on a map of New York's financial district. 

However, this volume does help to answer many questions.  Lets look at one example:

Dave Thompson sent me a scan of this stamp with a partial cancel.  We appear to have the following:

S. A. CRUIKS

DEC 13  1901

By putting the letters CRUIKS in to the Adobe search engine to search the .pdf of the document, one gets an immediate and satisfying return.  The search engine stopped me right at the portrait of Simeon A. Cruikshank, no doubt the canceller of this stamp:

The name Cruikshank is in blue because that is how Adobe highlights the word when you get a match for the search.

Now there is much to post about on this site, as I've got a backlog and fellow collectors like Dave Thompson have bunches of these stamps to explore.  There will be lots of dollar commerce stamps on this site showing up in September and beyond.

The Official Railway Equipment Register

 

A most useful tool for understanding the railroad business at the beginning of the 20th century, The Official Railway Equipment Register has been essential in decoding and understanding many of the firms that cancelled stamps in the 2ct documentary calendar featured on this site.  The document is available online and can be downloaded, and its age means that the content is out of copyright. 

Every generation of US government issued revenue stamps has its own tools for understanding the businesses that were the major users of the tax stamps.  By 1898, the railroad business in the United States was gigantic, and a major source for growth and facilitator of the economic and physical expansion of the United States.  The Official Railway Equipment Register and Poor's Manual are essential items for the 1898 documentary stamp collector.

Battleship Listing Changes in the 2012 Scott Volume 1 and US Specialized Catalogs

In the April 18, 2011 edition of Linn's Stamp News, James Kloetzel, the editor of the Scott Catalog, announced listing changes for several parts of the 2012 catalog, including those for the first issue and battleship documentary and battleship proprietary revenues.  Mr. Kloetzel is only specific about changes to the first issue revenues, but it can be inferred that similar changes to the first issue will be made to the battleships.  For years we've had to read across columns to discern the differences between rouletted and slot perfed stamps.  That will now change to the format present in the front section of the catalog.  Presumably the HH listings will be placed below the rouletted listings for each value, and there will now be only two columns for unused and used values.

This past year I did not buy a catalog.  2012 would be a year to buy; the changes will make it a more interesting proposition to receive the new catalog.

The stated reason for this change in the listing style was done due to the requirements of a new database. 

The Precancel News: The Fullerton List Makes News (or not?)

Frank Cunliffe deserves the credit for sending this scan of an article by Richard Fullerton in the January, 1953 edition of The Precancel News.  Frank hypothesizes that Mr. Fullerton, while never confirmed as a member of the American Revenue Association, may have been instead a dedicated precancel collector and a member of a one of the large precancel societies. 

Fullerton's formally published list of documentary printed cancels was issued July 1, 1952.  In a peculiar turn, the article below postdates the list but does not mention the existence of the list, though the list was apparently produced 6 months prior to the below article's publication.  All of the illustrations in the article are the same as those that appear in the list.  The article below does complement the list somewhat in the Mr. Fullerton maintains something of a chatty narrative even if he does not provide much additional information compared to the list.  The Charles Metz column posted a few days ago on this site does a better job of that.

Chambers Stamp Journal, November 1951: Railroad Printed Cancels

Big thanks go out to Frank Cunliffe for sending the scans of an article from Chambers Stamp Journal from 1951 on 1898 printed cancels.  The scans are included below.  The article provides some insight into some of the work that was done to organize and account for known railroad printed cancels prior to the publication of Richard Fullerton's list.

Charles Metz wrote a 4 column piece on railroad printed cancels, offering a list of the known types and values and quoting the collector Mr. D. S. Turney and his pursuit of the cancels.  This article provides information unavailable in Richard Fullerton's cancel list, particularly with regard to one of the rarest of the cancels, that made by the Chicago, Fort Madison, & Des Moines Railroad. 

I will hand it over to Mr. Metz:

"...Mr. D. S. Turney gives us a very interesting story about an unlisted printed railroad cancel, and for the benefit of Chambers readers we are reproducing it here.

"I have corresponded quite a bit with several of the better known collectors of these issues such as Chappell, Harold Field, Don Lighton, etc., regarding these issues, and have one item which I have never seen listed; nor have any of the above men heard of it.  This is the printed precancel on the 1c blue documentary battleship of the C. F. M. & D. M. R. R. (Chicago, Fort Madison and Des Moines Railroad).  The copy I have is on an original bill of lading of the C. B. & Q. R. R. used in January 1901.  Since this is "right in my own backyard", a little investigation locally, plus the kindness of the C. B. & Q. R. R. in Chicago brought out interesting facts that this was a short line that in its prime extended from Fort Madison, Iowa, northwestward to a junction with the C. B. & Q. R. R. near Batavia, Iowa (12 miles west of my home).

Richard Friedberg scan

"The short line was originally 3-foot gauge, what was standardized about 1890, and on January 1, 1900 the entire road, 71 miles long, was leased to the C. B. & Q..  Exactly a year later, the C. B. & Q. bought complete ownership of the road thru purchase of its securities, and its identity as the C. F. M. & D. M. ceased to exist.  My conclusion is that the C. B. & Q., which was fairly prolific in its use of printed precancels on the 1c blue on its leased and subsidiary lines, also caused precancels to be made for the short line after it assumed the lease in January 1900.  Probably these precancels were used during 1900 and the remainders used in 1901 after the C. B. & Q. became owner of the road. 

"The cancel is set up in block caps with serifs, all in one line and in black.  I became interested in these precancels, especially the R. R. issues, thru the acquisition of a large quantity of the bills of lading of the period 1898 to 1902, which were mostly from the midwestern railroads.  Among them were numerous copies of the C. B. & Q. and subsidiary lines, Chicago & Northwestern; Mo. Pacific; St. L. I. M. & So.; St. L. & S. W., and others.  It has made a fine collection, all being on the original instruments.

The Fullerton List: A Catalog of Railroad Company , Street Railway Company and Express Company Printed Cancellations on the 1898 U.S. Revenues

In July 1952, Richard Fullerton of Dayton, Ohio, published a list of known printed cancellations on the battleship revenues by railroads and express companies.  By November of that year he had compiled an addendum of additional cancel types.  The cover to Eric Jackson's 1992 reprint of this list is above.  The reprint consists of a mere 13 pages of printed cancel listings, in keeping with the short collecting field of documentary printed cancels. 

Fullerton was aided in his list by some of the notable US revenue collectors of the time, including Morton Dean Joyce, Henry Tolman, and Clarence Chappell, among others. 

The list of proprietary printed cancels is endless in comparison to this list, but the printed cancels on the documentary stamps are at least as interesting and in some cases highly elusive.  In the coming days I will post scans of those cancels available to me from this list.

Fullerton limited his list to railroads, street railways and express companies.  He numbered each of the companies by 5s, leaving lots of room for new companies and their cancels in the case of new discoveries.  Those companies that made his list include:

Railroads (21):

RR 005 Burlington & Missouri River Railroad in Nebraska - 5 collectable types/varieties

RR 010 Chicago, Burlington & Kansas City Railway - 2 collectable types/varieties

RR 015 Chicago, Burlington & Northern - 1 collectable type/variety

RR 020 Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad Company - 18 collectable types/varieties

RR 025 Chicago, Fort Madison & Des Moines Railroad - 1 collectable type/variety

RR 030 Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railway - 6 collectable types/varieties

RR 035 Chicago, North-Western Railway - 14 collectable types/varieties

RR 040 Chicago, St. Paul, Minneapolis & Omaha Railway Company - 6 collectable types/varieties

RR 045 Fremont, Elkhorn & Missouri Valley Railroad - 9 collectable types/varieties

RR 050 Hannibal & St. Joseph Railroad - 3 collectable types/varieties

RR 055 International & Great Northern Railroad - 8 collectable types/varieties

RR 060 Kansas City, Fort Scott & Memphis Railway - 2 collectable types/varieties

RR 065 Kansas City, North Western Railroad Company - 1 collectable type/variety

RR 070 Kansas City, St. Joseph & Council Bluffs Railroad - 6 collectable types/varieties w/addendum

RR 075 Missouri Pacific Railway Company - 6 collectable types/varieties

RR 080 St. Louis, Iron Mountain & Southern Railway - 3 collectable types/varieties

RR 085 St. Louis, Keokuk & Northwestern Railroad - 8 collectable types/varieties

RR 090 St. Louis, Southwestern Railway Company - 2 collectable types/varieties

RR 095 St. Louis, Southwestern Railway Company of Texas - 2 collectable types/varieties

RR 100 Sioux City & Pacific Railroad - 2 collectable types/varieties

Street Railways (2):

SR 005 Detroit & Wyandotte  Street Railway Company - 1 collectable type

SR 010 Union Street Railway Company - 1 collectable type

Express Companies (3):

EX 005 Adams Express Company - 4 collectable types/dates

EX 010 American Express Company - multiple types/varities w/addendum

EX 015 National Express Company - 5 collectable types/dates

There are non-railway and express firms that used printed cancels on the documentary stamps, including financial firms.  The companies in Fullerton's list and those using printed cancels that are not listed will be explored in the coming days.


The Fullerton list reprint is available for purchase at Eric Jackson's web site.

American Philatelist, August 1998: Remembering the Maine by Frank Sente

We are very fortunate at 1898 Revenues to have Frank Sente as a guest blogger.  Long before this site was ever created or conceived, Frank wrote a cover story for the American Philatelist magazine on battleship revenues and other 1898 series stamps.  Here we present the full article, Courtesy of  The American Philatelist, monthly magazine of The American Philatelic Society.
Each page is downloadable by clicking on the image of the page.  In coming days a downloadable .pdf file of the article will be added to the column on the right.

Battleship Boosterism: The Weekly Philatelic Gossip from 1928

I've always had a soft spot for antique philatelic journalism (doesn't everybody?).  The Weekly Philatelic Gossip stopped publishing in 1961, but is the source for some great early work on 1898 revenues, including articles on cancels on the battleship series.

The paper was published in the town of Holton, Kansas..  Holton is due north of Topeka about halfway to the Nebraska state line.  The current town has just a little over 3000 residents, but for several generations the Weekly Philatelic Gossip came out of this small Kansas town and was one of the most important publications in philately.  At the end of this post I've included the full pages of the 1928 article I am about to review, and if you download these pages you can see the advertising that came to the Gossip from dealers all over the United States.

The editor of the Gossip in mid-1928 selected the battleship revenues as the subject for a front page article given to boosterism and a sales pitch for battleship stamps coupled with available facts on the series.  Below is most of the article in sequential order, cut into sections so I can comment as you read along.  Enjoy!

"The Battleship That Caused A War" hardly indicates the content of the article, which is about the battleship series of revenue stamps and not the Battleship Maine that exploded in Havana Harbor in Cuba and accelerated the call for war with Spain in the United States.  There is some writing about this ship, however...

I can't argue with the author's statement that what he calls the "Sleeper Set" of US revenues should be in every collection due to their history.  This site is much about the history of this set, and about the companies that used these stamps.  If by sleeper he means the set receives Rodney Dangerfield, "no respect" treatment, I agree with that too...

Maybe I'm missing something.  While the comment about these stamps being within the reach of everyone remains true 82 years after the printing of this article, I am not sure the claim about the fine quality of the set holds relative to other classic sets.  The Columbians?  Trans-Mississippi?  

Yes!  Get your battleship revenues now before it is too late.  As he says, the old fellows are no more in the making.   I don't think anyone has to worry too much, though.  Here we are, 82 years after this article, and the old fellows are still fairly cheap.  Collecting styles have made the plate blocks valuable, but most of the singles remain cheap.  Oddly, he never mentions the differences between rouletting and hyphen hole perforations and the relative scarcity of some hyphen hole values.

"The half cent orange is very rare.  The writer has never seen a copy, unused, and does not know how many of them were issued"  I think the author needed his own copy of Elliot Perry's book.  Then he could have known how many were issued.  Meanwhile, here is one used...

A journal like the Weekly Philatelic Gossip prospered at a time of high interest in stamp collecting and an otherwise illiquid market in information about stamps.  Here courtesy of the internet, is proof that the 1/2 cent orange does indeed exist...

Interesting catalog numbers.  There is only one number for 1/2 cent value, so there is no differentiation between the orange and grey stamps. 

Scott doesn't use this range of numbers for revenues anymore.  The company gave up the practice decades ago, even before the USPS started putting cartoon fish and other sorts of nonsense on stamps, bloating the numbers of stamps issued for modern collectors and requiring Scott to assign hundreds of new numbers every year.  Of course now all the revenue numbers begin with R. 

The 10 cent documentary was, according to this author, not very plentiful.  I suppose the documents on which it was used started to show up after the publication of this article?

Hmm...a stamp dealer tried to manipulate the return of tax stamps?

There isn't much of this type of philatelic journalism left: promotional, packed with facts, and quite long.  Open up the pages below and see the ads.  At least as interesting!

The Revenue Stamps of the United States: Battleship Part Roulettes

Christopher West/Elliot Perry's book on the revenue stamps of the United States has a short chapter at the end of the book and the section on 1898 revenue stamps for "various items."  One of those items is a section on part roulettes.  Here is an excerpt, with my own illustrations (book text in italics):

   Part Roulettes. -- A number of the documentaries and proprietaries exist rouletted vertically, but not horizontally, or vice versa, and at least one stamp -- the 2c documentary -- is known imperforate, that is, without any horizontal or vertical rouletting.  The Boston Book also mentions the 10c documentary imperf, but this value is not now so catalogued.  The stamps listed as existing rouletted horizontally only are: 3/8 and 2c proprietary and $1 green, $3 brown and $10 black documentary.

   The 3/8c proprietary is not rare, nor particularly scarce, part rouletted.  Blocks are frequently seen and at least one full sheet is in existence.  The 2c proprietary part rouletted was offered for sale in May, 1901, the owner stating only 120 pairs existed.  The would indicate that not less that two sheets escaped the vertical roulette...

The "not rare" 3/8c proprietary part roulette.  Deep orange in color

The "not rare" 3/8c proprietary part roulette.  This pair is burnt orange in color.  Color differences in orange stamps are often due to sulfurization, which tends to turn some of the 1/2 cent orange documentary and 3/8 cent proprietary stamps darker, if not brown.  If the colors are true, however, differing colors in the pairs would indicate the part roulette error occured on more than one press run. 

Margin copy of the 2c proprietary part roulette.  I have two pairs of this stamp in this condition and the pairs are not that expensive or scarce.  There are certainly more copies than the 120 pairs reported by Perry.

   The stamps listed as existing rouletted vertically only are: 1/4c, 5/8c, 1c, 2 1/2c, 5c proprietary and 1/2c gray, 1c, 2c, 3c, 4c, 5c, 10c, $1 green documentary.  The Boston Book mentions also the 1/8c and 1 1/4c proprietary, but the existence of the latter stamp part rouletted could not be verified.  As the 1/8c is not now so catalogued, quite likely it also lacks proper verification.  The dealer who offered the 2c proprietary "imroulette" vertically, also offered the 2c proprietary, rouletted vertically only, in January, 1901, and stated that the entire lot was two sheets.  This would be 200, 216, or 232 stamps, but others may have been found and the stamp is not very scarce today.  The 5/8c part roulette, is usually found in vertical paris cancelled "Maltine."  Only a few pairs and strips are known.  The 1/4c, 1c and 5c are seldom seen. 

Part roulette 5/8c proprietary block of 4 with Maltine logo handstamp cancel.  While Perry indicated this part roulette to be scarce at the time of his writing, the current catalog value for a pair, $85, would indicate that more pairs have come to light in the past 90 years.

5/8c proprietary part roulette pair with Malitine handstamp in roman.  Perry/West doesn't indicate the the type of Maltine handstamp cancel that was familiar to him.

5/8c proprietary part roulette horizontal pair. Unreported by Elliot Perry.

1 1/4c proprietary part roulette horizontal pair.  There is rouletting to the left and right of the pair but not between the two stamps.  There is no evidence of blind roulettes.  This type of partial roulette is rare among all battleships.  Virtually all cases of part roulettes involve non-rouletting on the vertical or horizontal of the entire sheet.  From Tolman's collection of part roulettes.  Unreported by Elliot Perry and unlisted in Scott.

2 1/2c proprietary part roulette vert guideline block of 4. Image of this block can be found in the Joyce and Tolman auction catalogs.

5c proprietary part roulette pair.  Reported by Elliot Perry as "seldom seen".

   The 1c, 2c, and 10c documentary part rouletted are fairly common, the 1/2c less so, and the 4c and 5c quite rare.  Of the 4c, only two blocks, both unused, which came from the same sheet, are on record.  The 5c was reported from Philadelphia in 1898, and some were also used in Chicago in October of that year.

2c documentary pair part roulette

Examples of 1c and 10c part roulettes can be found in previous posts.