Why You Need A Certificate For US Coils

This Scott 386 beauty has been offered on a prestigious website for 5 months. Priced at $ 713.63 but no takers. I wonder why?

Two reasons...

1. No cert
2. No sane rational person would pay that much even WITH a cert...

worse , the design says 2Cents2 , not TwoCents, so it is not WORTH 2 cents 2

Didn't notice that... correct you are... (smiling)

Haven't even bothered to list this #386 beauty at my ebay store ... the Dealer Catalog Value is only $150.

Carl - you are taking the high-road. I think any dealer who sells any US flat-plate coils without certificates is patently untrustworthy [just my opinion].

Carl
Those perfs seem to line up (top to bottom), this is something that is possible but highly improbable with flat plate coils. I would recommend you have some experts look at this one before listing it.
Don

Chasa ... you give me too much credit. I'm trying to sell most of my collection. About 75% of the value is in 25% of the stamps. The rest ... those with a Catalog Value under $200 ... will probably be passed down to some future niece or nephew.

51Studebaker ... The Catalog Value of #386 is $165. My asking price would be around $30. There is no economic sense in getting it certified.

By the way, one of my fond recollections as an Industrial Design student back in 1955 was visiting Raymond Loewy's design studio.

Auction Houses have 150- 300 range with certifications..The highest seen sold for a coil was over 1,700.00 with certification and graded 95 at usphila.com.

Carl,
Yes, I held Loewy on a pedestal for many years. But then back in the early 1980's I got a chance to talk to Bob Bourke, a lead designer in Loewy Studios for Studebaker in the 1950s. It became clear to me that the real design work was done by people like Bourke. Loewy would come into the studio to eyeball the drawings and clay models, command a few changes, and then get most of the credit. Loewy Studios certainly had influence on Studebakers from the 1930s to the 1960s (and also designed stamps and one of the USPS logos). He is often given credit for the Coke Cola bottle but again, had only a minor influence on it. But without question Loewy was a great designer in his own right and was a big part of the 'streamlining' of the 1930s.

I would recommend that you include a question mark after the #386 in the listing unless you get it certified. I am about 90% sure it is a fake, hopefully Clark will weigh in with his opinion. There have been many, many #386s sold on ebay in the $20-30 range. Most are questionable, I assume these are ones that folks are willing to take a chance on. Ones with certs start around $100 to go to around $200.
Don

Don,

It is difficult to make an iron-clad determination from a low quality scan. However, visually, something is "not right" about the appearance of the stamp. The imperf edges most closely resemble an auto-wound coil. Remainder imperf auto-wound coils were fraudulently perforated 12, 8½ or 10 in the 1960s to resemble perforated coils. Few, if any, auto-wound perf 12 coils were produced before the changeover to perf 8½ needed to keep the web from breaking when coiling pasted up half sheets. (Hand assembled coils were pasted up after being cut up into strips.)

The perforations would require closer examination for fibers and pressure ridges, but the perforation tips appear to be too wide because the holes are round instead of elliptical. Also, some creasing or paper irregularities can be seen above the lower left corner. Finally, the centering is too good to be true.

I checked in Photoshop and found the edges to be not exactly matching or parallel, but OK if an early auto-wound imperf coil. The perforations were reasonably parallel. Lacking metadata in the image, it was not possible to measure the perforations except relative to the design. (Someone resized or took other steps to obfuscate the image.)

Clark

Clark, if the centering hadn't been "... too good to be true", I would not have bought it for my personal collection.

In any case, the point is moot, since I have not yet reached (and probably won't) the point where I would list anything with a Catalog Value of less then $200. Too little return and too much effort for these old bones. (OK, call me lazy!)

I can guarantee that without a certificate, a knowledgeable dealer will assign no value to the stamp when buying the collection if you ever decide to sell it.

Clark

Clark, that's why I decided to sell my pre-1920's collection piecemeal on ebay. So far, I've sold 12% of the stamps for 40% of the total Dealer Catalog Value ... almost $8000, each stamp averaging 21% of DCV.

OK, you guys have got me doing some research.

Here's an excellent source reference.

http://www.philatelicfoundation.org...coil-stamps/

A screen-capture from the site: