About "Rare" Mystic Stamps?

OK, so I was looking at the 2012 supplements page when I decided to click on their "rare stamps" link. How can they sell a pair of #318 for 20K??
I realize that they do indeed command high prices, sometimes North of 5,000. a piece but this just seems outrageous! Anyone else think that may be a tad on the high side? lol

link to sale:
http://www.mysticrarestamps.com/ite...?item_id=424

Here is the pic from their site.

That's nothing new. Remember, a seller can ask anything they want for a stamp (or any other item for that matter). The key is to get a willing buyer to pay that price.

Mystic has a reputation for overpricing their retail sales items. But for those who absolutely need a special item and have the resources to pay dearly for it, I suppose it's just another way for Mystic to make their profit.

I recently received a flyer from Mystic offering some newer stamps from the 1980s at a price that was 33% higher than the Scott catalog; the same item was offered by another seller on ebay for a BIN price of only a fraction of what the Scott catalog lists it at. So just remember the old adage "Buyer Beware" when buying material from such sources.

Back to the actual scanned illustration you provided, I'm no expert on these older issues, but something doesn't look right to me. Check out the perforations that don't line up ... and doesn't that look like a repair toward the top of the stamp?

Yes, it's way over the top. Matthew Bennett international auction a lightly hinged pair realized $6500.00. Image is not available and the pair above should bring a premium for the centering, but $20K ? That places Mystic in the Steve Malack & Bill Lang category. A pair like this that has been faked thousands of times must have a certificate.

1908, 1¢ blue green coil (318), pair. Well centered and remarkably fresh. O.g., lightly hinged. Very Fine. An outstanding pair of this rare coil.
Scott $14,000

Expertization: 1949, 1995, 2002 P.F. Certificates- the 1949 cert. for a strip of four)
J.C. Morganthau & Co. backstamp.


Realized $6,500

The prefs should not line up across the pair. When they do, it's about 99.9% probable that they are fake.

Then why, in the above example, do the perfs seem to line up at the outer ends and not in the center? Is that normal?

Just luck of the draw. The perf spacing from one side of a stamp to the other (and in this case, to an additional stamp) has an infinite number of positions.

Picture yourself with a pizza cutter with pins. Run that down a row of stamps to create perforations. Now use the same pizza cutter on the next row. The two rows won't line up because it's nearly impossible to start perforating at the exact same point on a sheet.

Now secure 10 pizza cutters together and run them down the rows of a sheet. Again, none of the perforations will line up from row-to-row and column-to-column because you can't get them to start punching holes at exactly the same time.

This is an over-simplification, but the premise is the same.

Russ has posted photos of perf machines in previous threads. It would be worth taking a look.

Brian

Hi wt1,

re: perforation mis-alignment

Yes it is normal. According to Paul W Schmid in 'How to detect Damaged, Altered and Repaired Stamps' each vertical row of perforations can be on a different alignment due to each of the perforation wheels being separately aligned on the axis rod of the rotary perforator. As revcollector says, if each row of perforations was perfectly aligned with the others it would indicate the pair was almost certainly a fake.

Terry

Ps. Rileysan beat me to it with a good analogy.

TC.

Thanks. I learned something new today!

Items like this are never really intended for sale. It merely brings attention to them and their catalog.

Thank you for the replies. It ain't a wonder he could afford that Z grill...haha

WT - what you have circled as a possible repair is probably just a crease at that perf

Thanks!

I think the best explanation of this whole thread was the earlier comment that due to the prices being asked by Mystic for such "rarities", they never really expect to sell them at their inflated prices, but rather they use them as illustrations in their catalog.