USA Scott #r98 $20 Conveyance Stamp Grossly Misperfed.

This revenue stamp with misperfs popped up in a mixed lot a friend and I were going through. My 2019 US Scott Specialized lists the catalogue value for a "normal" specimen as $125.00.

I know next to nothing about revenues, and my friend does not do much digitally with stamps. He may sell it, if the price is right, to a couple revenue collectors he knows at the next local bourse coming up in Atlanta.

My question: is there a market for such an item? Any premium over a "normal" manuscript version of the same revenue stamp? I kind of find the Christmas Eve (Dec. 24th 1868) intriguing as well.

Any comments as to the potential value, or best place to market this?

Not a lot if any, more likely a price reduction. See: http://www.battleship-revenues.com/...les/Ros.html for a brief overview.

I would not count on the originals actually being original either. Back in the 1890's, when ABNCO was buying up all the other bank note companies, they kept getting the archives of each company. They had no use for most of them, so they sold them off as waste paper and scrap metal. That included perforating wheels. Most were purchased by philatelic sources, and freak perfs were a big deal at the time. So there were a number of people more then ready to help the market for them along. So at this point, it's an open question whether anyone can actually tell most of the time. I know that there are some people who claim to be able to do so, but I have never seen any convincing proof of this.

I generally treat them as a negative, tantamount to a punch cancel, and avoid them wherever possible.

Unfortunately there are high profile national dealers/sellers that continue to market them as a positive.

The only time I actively seek them out is if they are still on document. If you try to hunt for ones on original documents you will discover that you don't see ones at bizarre angles. What you find are examples where the second set of perfs runs parallel to the first... which logically makes sense. If extra perforations are truly a result of actual production issues rather than after-the-fact fabriaction, they would be a result of feeding a sheet through the perforator twice... meaning the extra perforations would be in almost the same position and alignment as the first set.

Some examples of what I would call "genuine freak perfs":