Gunna Have Some Fun With This One!

Just had to pick up this lot... not cheap by any means, but should be a blast; a wide variety of revenues. Overall the quality is quite clean, and it appears that the previous owner also liked cancels.

I'll cherrypick the cancels I want to keep and lot the remainder for individual sale. Given the overall clean condition, I should do fine.

Wow, that is a nice attractive collection you got there. I have been successful thus far in staving off the desire to collect US revenues. ;o)

Come to the dark side... we have cookies! :)

I tend to stay away from lots. I didn't do very well when I did. Perhaps I should try again. If fun could be measured you have it in spades!

Art

<drool>

Looks like a whole lotta fun to me!

Some nice cancels...I'm envious.

These are really nice looking! I don't really look for revenues to collect, but I could be tempted. Sheesh - as if it weren't bad enough that Tony's trying to subvert us all to collect Indian States, and Sir Rodney has me hankering after postmarks!

Love all those rugs, what a collection!!

Just recieved the lot today, and after examining the collection, I'm doing the snoopy dance. Exceptionally clean quality.

Some of the images in the listing were broken links. The description mentioned 25 pages, but only about 20 were shown, even including the broken links, so I checked the image properties, analyzed the naming convention in the filenames, and tried accessing the missing images by typing the URLs directly into the browser... which worked. I found several pages of stamps not shown in the listing, however when reconciling against the verbal description, it all added up.

I'm guessing that most people didn't bother to do the sleuthing, and never saw the missing pages, as now that I've cataloged the lot, it went for much less than it should have.

Just for fun, without spending a whole lot of time on it, what do YOU guesstimate the above lot catalogs for in 2012 Scott, using the following guidelines:

1. All stamps are shown; there's nothing you're not seeing.

2. I did not include any thing cataloging under $2.

3. I discounted heavily where there where obvious faults.

4. All cut and punch cancels are cataloged as such.

5. I did not assign any premium for cancels (which is just pure bonus, as the collection is loaded with them).


By way of disclosure, even having seen all images prior to bidding, I was WAAAAAAYYY off in my guesstimate.


I'll give it a few days and give the total.

My 5 second est. Is $1700 CV and I'm guessing you paid a little less than 10% of that.

I figured the whole lot as roughly $2500 cat, at auction it would be probably be estimated at $400-$600 and if properly described with the cancels and the better second and third issues as the draw it might bring as much as $750-$800.

Heh. We're on the same page, Bart. That was approximately my assessment when making my max bid.

I'll let this run a while before revealing the actual numbers.

On your first page of Proprietary, your 6c is remarkably similar to mine, yours cancelled May 4, mine Sep 4.

Could this be some kind of precancel?

Charles Osgood cancels were ubiquitous on proprietary stamps; his company was one of the major users of the stamps. In fact, I believe that the 6c Proprietary (R31c) was created specifically at the request of the company (Bart, please correct me if I'm misremembering, but I believe that was the case).

It was at Osgood's request that the stamp was created; 600 sheets were printed and delivered on April 13, 1871. The second issue stamps were delivered Sept. 2, 1871, as were the first proprietary issue. This short usage time and the way proprietaries were used is why the R31c is so scarce.

To answer the question of precancels, yes they were. That is why you can see a bit of another cancel at the left margin. Many revenues with SON cancels from the 1862-1875 era were precancelled by the companies. This both helped to prevent theft and saved time, since the stamp was to be put on a document to show proof of tax paid the precancel made no difference(effectively the tax was paid when the stamp was purchased).