Nice Illegal Revenue Use Cover

Just arrived today from ebay. It's a little frayed around the edges, but it's got really nice aesthetics. It's an illegal use of R155, also an all-over advertising cover and has a crisply-struck second-day-of-issue cancel.

That's a beaut. Somebody had nice handwriting!

In a nutshell, what does illegal revenue mean?

That's a cracking cover!
I wonder if Ludwig realised, that generally,
cancelled stamps were going to hide his surname?

The 2-cent stamp shown with the overprint "I.R." (for Internal Revenue) was a postage stamp intended to be re-directed for use as a revenue stamp and therefore the overprint should have made it invalid (illegal) to use for postage.

His surname is uncovered! It's Ludwig Schill, 839 Broad St., Newark, NJ, a prominent local photographer of his day. Here's one of his newspaper ads from 1890:



And a horrific family incident a year or so later:

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archiv...415B8985F0D3

And a sample of his work:



And a close-up of his trademark name at the bottom of the above photograph:

Extraordinary, looks like it was commonplace
to photograph the dead in those times.
I have seen them with the likes of Ned Kelly etc.

I believe it was common for rich people to take photographs with or of dead family members. They were usually seated and propped up, sometimes held by others in the photo.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-m..._photography

Very nice - I remember bidding on this a few weeks ago but forgot to follow up on the auction! Glad to see it went to a SCF member, and at around ten dollars a great deal, I think!

Vintage pics of "sleeping" kids are almost always post-mortem portraits. Creepy now, but I guess it wasn't creepy then? (shudder...cringe...)

Child mortality rates, even in wealthy countries, was much higher 100 years ago.

Perhaps it was one way that the parents could deal with the death of their child. When I lived in Ethiopia (2005 - 2007) we went for a trip into the countryside for a conference. On the way home, the bus we were travelling behind hit a child. We stopped and I still remember looking over that child as he bled from his ears and mouth and thinking that he was the same age as my eldest child (about 8). This image still affects me over 5 years later. I couldn't imagine how hard it would be to have my child die so young. Perhaps having a photo like this was one way of helping to come to grips with this loss. If I lost a child and didn't have a photo of them, I'd probably do the same thing, even though it would be quite creepy.

Wonderful cover!

Could this be an attempt at creating a FDC for the revenue stamp?