Battleship Revenues: 1 Cent Documentary

The one and two cent documentary stamps were the workhorses of the 1898 documentary series. Hundreds of millions wre printed, both in the roulette and hyphen hole formats. Below are posted singles and blocks of four for the roulette and hyphen hole types.

Unused roulette single.

Unused roulette block of four.

Unused hyphen-hole single. I need to touch up the frame around this stamp. The single is torqued a bit in the orginal Vario page and I rotated it a couple of degrees digitally, leaving the white wedges surrounding the frame.

Unused hyphen-hole block of four.

I've already done one entry on the roulette and hyphen-hole issue. I never brought up one source of confusion regarding these stamps and the stamp-business that left me confused about the battleships for years.

Like many collectors of my vintage and before (I was born in the early 60s) I was given a beginners stamp album soon after I expressed an interest in stamp collecting. As I recall, mine was titled "My First Stamp Album." It was hard-bound, yellow, and had a drawing of a boy scout, a girl and other prospective collector types. Whatever the case, I quickly advanced to a Scott National Album and eventually I acquired the revenue pages for collecting US revenue stamps.

I learned much from those pages and from the Scott catalog. From the first series I moved the perfs (all the "c's") to the beginning, the imperfs or a's right behind the perfs, and placed the part perfs after them. I did this just because I had more perfs and I liked being able to open the album to a more filled out page. But then I had to set up a bunch of blank pages for the silk papers. And I wondered why Scott would have pages for major perf varieties but not a major paper variety.

Whatever the case, it was the 1898 issue that caused me the most confusion. Forget the silk papers. The album only held spaces for one perf variety of the battleships and the dollar value 1898s. And the type to display wasn't even designated. If I had to guess I would say that the typical revenue page collector would have a mish-mash of HH and roulette stamps for their 1898s. With no space for the two types of stamps. I had to put blank pages in to mount the hyphen holes and left the designated spaces for the rouletted stamps.

This lack of space gave me the impression for years that the distinction between the types was largely unimportant to philately, since the first issue perf, part perf, and imperf stamps all had their own spaces in the album. Why weren't the 1898s given the same respect.

I don't use an album anymore. And the hyphen hole and roulette distinction is one of the most important distinctions in 1898 collecting. The difference certainly affects values. Those differences I will explore in later posts.

1898 Revenues: Perforation Types

Perhaps the most significant feature of the 1898 revenue series beyond the basic battleship design is the method the Bureau of Engraving and Printing applied so that users could separate the stamps. Standard round perforations (now mostly history due to die cutting used on self-stick stamps) were not used on the 1898 revenues. Instead, the Bureau used both "rouletting" and rectangular perforations. Roulette: The block above has been rouletted. As you can see by looking between the stamps, there appear to be a series of cuts. These were made by a wheel with the equivalent of short knife blades on it that cut in between the stamps. The process removes no paper and does not make a hole. By this standard a roulette is not a perforation. Hyphen Hole: The block below has hyphen hole perforations. This process is a perforation process and does remove paper from the stamp sheet. Unlike normal round perforations these are oblong slots that look something like hyphens, hence the name hyphen hole.

When the stamps first appeared in 1898 they were exclusively scored using rouletting. By early 1900 only hyphen-holes were used by the Bureau. I chose blocks to illustrate the difference between roulette and hyphen-hole. Single stamps make it sometimes difficult at first glance to detect the difference between hyphen hole and roulette. Formally, hyphen-hole stamps on this issue are labeled as HH 7 since there are 7 holes per 2cm. Rouletting in R 5.5, since there are 5 and half roulette cuts per 2cm.

The 2 cent documentaries did have stamps that were issued without any rouletting, at least as partial roulettes. There are no known stamps, at least to my knowledge, that are combined imperforate and hyphen hole.