A Warning About Souvenir Card Cutouts That Look Like Proofs

I just saw these two items sell on e-bay. At first glance, this first one looks like it could be a 3P2 Roosevelt small die proof or another card proof, but I believe it is just a cutout from a souvenir card worth about $5.


My warning is, if you are not an expert in an area, don't spend big dollars on something that you don't know much about. Can't blame the dealer, completely, because they did offer it "As Is", but that is another red flag that they don't know what it is either, or they do know but didn't want to tell you.




Here is the second one.


This resembles the bi-color essay 286-E8 (pictured below from the Smithsonian Postal Museum), but again I believe the item above is just a cutout from an inexpensive souvenir card.




Photos from ebay unless otherwise noted.

No surprise when I see who the seller is. Been going on for decades.

What is odd to me, though, is that I purchased a handful of lots from nystamps over the years and they were all fine - exactly as expected. None were probably more than $20 ... but then there is something disheartening like this. Perhaps it's such a mill at the place that material is received and then just posted by non-stamp people exactly as it was received and described without any vetting?

Maybe, but there are hundreds of comments on this forum and others over the years about this very thing and the "mistakes" trend in one direction. In the seller's favor.

From 2010:

ttps://www.stampcommunity.org/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=9423&whichpage=1

From 2015:

https://www.stampcommunity.org/topi...PIC_ID=46609

I've bought dozens of times from N.Y. Stamps with no problem at all, collections included, but there must be an explanation both for why any sane person would pay that much money for this stuff pretty clearly cut from a cheap souvenir card -- and why a seller would sell it in the first place . . . ? Greed may be the reason for the latter, but maybe a lotting employee just assumed that since it was not in the catalogue, it must be something special? I kind of doubt that, but my inclination is to think well of people.

I corrected one dealer on a major listing error (which would have been to his economic benefit) and his reply to me was that you can't hire educated help these days who can work reliably, etc. So he blamed his employee for the mistake. Either that's true or that's false, but collectors should adhere to the principle of caveat emptor. I've almost never gotten a product that wasn't what it was advertised as, but I did once get a postwar set of overprinted Austrian Hitler-head stamps that was the cheaper of the two varieties being sold as the more expensive variety. Those went right back but I got no apology.

As for these items, they're almost too silly to believe. If you're around stamps awhile, you see souvenir cards from time to time, so why would anyone look at these items and not wonder if they're from souvenir cards? Plus of course the question about whether N.Y. Stamps stretches acceptable stamp selling standards?

I once received a very nice-looking collection I paid cheap money for, but did not discover until years later that it was virtually all stuck to the pages. I'm an idiot for not checking right away, but I'm sure it was sold to me that way, so I'm off that particular dealer.

I'll add one more little example. Years ago, a well-known dealer of marginal stamp lots was repeatedly selling unmarked plastic bags of the much loved but no-longer-made "Dennison" stamp hinges which today sell for a lot more than normal cheap hinges. Somehow they had magically come out of their original packaging. When I complained to Linn's that these ads seemed to be offering a very unlikely product in unlikely large quantities and that it would be easy for Linn's to look at them to determine if they were the real deal or just some other cheap hinges, I got no reply from Linn's, but the ads soon stopped.

Like used cars, what you think it is, is often not what it actually is.