Earlier this year at our local show, I spent some time chatting with one of the dealers about cancels in general, and how my specializing in U.S. revenue cancels had given me an appreciation of worldwide socked-on-the-nose cancels, especially on classic era stamps. I mentioned that I was starting to go back through my old accumulations of worldwide material, and picking out bullseye cancels.
He said that for many years he worked on a worldwide date calendar covering 1880-1920 and it was 99% complete. No, he wasn't willing to part with it, but in the course of working on it, every time he got a lot or collection of material, he always went through and pulled out stamps that had readable date cancels, in order to go through them later. He still had all those stamps kept separately, even though he'd gone through them, and if I wanted, he'd send them to me on approval.
Ok, sure.
Well, 2 months went by and I forgot about it. On Friday a big bulky envelope showed up with literally several thousand classic stamps. His letter said take as many as I wanted for 10 cents each.
His primary concern when pulling the stamps aside had been readable dates, so there were a lot of stamps that really weren't full bullseye cancels, or were partially struck, etc. Regardless, I picked out over 400 examples for my collection. Some of the stamps were a little munged, but it's kinda hard to go wrong for 10 cents per. A little bit of anything and everything: postal, back of book, revenues, cut squares, you name it.
There are even a couple of slightly better stamps in the mix.
The best part is that in his letter he says he has more to send me if I want... I want.
Posted 12/04/2011 7:38 pm
