US 1923-29 #601 M-Nh Martha Washington - "Witches Brew"

Good Afternoon All,

I had to share this stamp as it made me laugh when I saw it. You'll have to admit - she does look a bit like a witch - but I'll let you be the judge. Whoever was in charge of stamp production was apparently asleep at the switch. I'm calling this one "Witches Brew" due to the giant wart on her nose. (This is no trick of the eye or error by the scanner - this is the actual stamp)

US 1923-29 #601 M-NH Martha Washington - "Witches Brew"



Let the comments begin!

Are you going to list one for $14,000 too?
Don

My biggest pet peeve for online sellers is when they use all caps like they're desperately trying to get my attention

The double eye Martha Washington is one of my favorite stamps - I admit, I'm just selling it for an astronomical price to see who on earth would pay that much. It's more of a test than anything. I'm lowering the price consistently, the all caps is to hopefully draw attention and not deter.

ZOOM IN to the nose and mouth, quite disturbing. It's worth a look and a laugh imo.

Indeed. These are the types of listings which hurt the hobby much more than they promote it.

Patience. I will slowly decrease the price over time and I don't believe there's anything wrong with that. The double eye martha washington took forever to discover and get certified. You would not believe the criticism I received for that stamp. It's my own personal inverted Jenny so it does mean a lot to me personally as a collector. So when I go to sell it... I want to maximize what I can get for a one of a kind stamp. Also, it was a one of a kind battle of comments across forums. Yes, a lot of mud was thrown at me then too.

What does truly hurt stamp collectors and stamp collecting is negative comments like the one's you've posted here. This post is supposed to be funny and uplifting. Full of goofy comments and bad references to Looney Tunes. Neither of your comments are even about the original posted topic. Make stamp collecting and posting more enjoyable by leaving out so much unnecessary criticisms. I pray you all have peace and love in your hearts. Please have the patience for someone who may have high hopes and extreme passions for finding unicorns. Hope that made you laugh a little.

But not anything negative!

Feed back as a seller is zero. Imagine that.

I will say Martha is three grand less than the Brady card.

With those prices I'd quote Dorothy but Martha is still in Kansas.

The double eye definitely looks like the effects of a stamp on top getting slightly glued to it then being separated. It seems that since the double eye was requested to be noted in the cert, so it was done, but not because the certifier particularly wanted to note it. I've heard that when sending in items to be certified, some expertizers avoid commenting negatively in specifics on anything that the sender doesn't want to have said. By that I mean, I'm sending in this zep to be expertizers for centering, don't comment on its gum or anything unrelated to centering. The expertizers here didn't want to explicitly mention the potential gum residue but backhandedly included it. But I digress

I always wondered when I saw those ridiculous listings who was behind them. My assumption was scammers or ignorant non-collectors or a combination there of. IMO these type of listings degrade the hobby and frankly make Ebay look trashier than need be. I do not buy in to the "entertainment" reason for a listing like this. More like the spider and the fly. Sure, it should be a really, really long shot that someone is stupid enough to buy the stamp for five figures but in theory it could happen. People fall for all types of internet scams every second of the day. Putting this listing out there puts the lister in the same category as some scammer sitting in Ghana working lonely old people for their life's savings.

In my opinion 'Trolling for Suckers' is not a good thing for the hobby or a seller's reputation.

I do support a seller being allowed to ask whatever they want and that sometimes asking a higher than typical market value for material you really do not want/need to sell, but there is a line that crosses into the 'Trolling for Suckers' category.
Don

What if you really DID sell it for more than $10000? Would you (more honestly) tell the buyer, "just kidding"?

I, for one, could not go through with a sale at that level.

So, isn't it just trolling, if you are gradually lowering the price, to hook the fish?

What is a level for a price that you could sell this at and have some level of integrity, knowing that the true market price should be much lower?

My intake from this thread is that buying from SCF members just because they are SCF members is no longer safe. Lesson learned.

Well, a couple of Spanish members put an end to that a couple of years ago.

Rob Roy, the Mormon church learned a long time ago not to buy artifacts from its parishioners