From The FDR Collection

I was thumbing through some first flight covers I hadn't looked at in some time and discovered one with a very interesting back stamp. The cover itself is quite humble and not in very good condition. Hardly worth holding onto, except ... it's addressed to the President of the United States. And on the back, in small type, it is marked "From the Franklin D. Roosevelt Collection / Authenticated by H.R. Harmer, Inc., N.Y."

I recall hearing about FDR's collection being auctioned many moons ago, but was surprised to find one of his covers had landed in my hands. I would imagine there are many other items out there from FDR's collection -- are there other forum members who can post anything more?

I do not own any, though I have been offered them from time to time. Every President receives huge quantities of "gifts" from all over the country of everything one can imagine. The White House has a staff of people whose job it is to receive everything and organize it and if it is a larger item to send a form thank you letter to the sender. In most cases the President never sees the stuff that comes. In the case of FDR after his presidency all of the philatelic material sent to him was consigned to Harmers Auction company and sold off as being from FDR's collection, even though FDR likely never handled or even saw most of it. In the case of this cover, my guess is that the postmaster of the town of Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania sent this letter to the President in hopes of getting a bit of attention in being able to remain as postmaster. Back then, postmaster jobs were all political handouts to local party members and while technically they were appointed by the president, actually it was lower lever political operatives in the party of whomever was president who handed out the postmaster appointments. Today it is different with postmasters having to earn their jobs through merit.

Thanks for the information, Kimo. I suspect you are right about this cover and probably a lot of other material. However, I did a little online searching and found a Zeppelin cover attributed to the FDR collection that pre-dates his time in office. So it appears that there really are some items that he probably collected himself.

FDR was a avid stamp collector, all of his life I believe.

Smithsonian National Postal Museum has this related comment....

"Winning bidders in Harmer's FDR auctions could have their purchases marked with a rubber stamp to verify that they came from the president's collection."

http://postalmuseum.si.edu/collecti...ght/fdr.html

You should check out this item;

http://www.ebay.com/itm/NobleSpirit...AOSwWTRW1asd

Interesting Noble Spirit item. While many of the covers are relatively common, I'm surprised that a philatelic museum hasn't purchased the collection to acquire the stamp sketches by FDR.

This lot strikes me as being seriously overvalued even with the sketches. FDR signed a lot of philatelic material, so the covers he signed are not tremendously valuable, the rest of the family is worth less, and everything else has little serious value. To me it appears to be priced at least twice what it is worth.

I saw this item from Noblespirit yesterday and it was priced at $12,500, I don't know if they removed material from the collection or just rethought their price. I agree that the price seems high but I liked seeing the stamp sketches. I quess he was a bit of a micro-manager!

Not counting stamps, I saw roughly 30 or so discreet covers and sketches. I doubt the stamps are worth a lot, so for the sake of argument ignore them. $8500 divided by 30 is roughly $280. Is any item in that collection worth $280, let alone 30 of them? Many of the later FDC's are signed by children. If I collected those FDC's, I might consider spending $30 or $40 for those, but nowhere near $280. The sketches are historical curiosities, but I doubt if anyone would pay $280 for any of them. Put these 30 items up for individual auction and you'd be lucky to get $1000 for the lot, I suspect.

I figured the sketches at $250-$300 each retail, thinking that specialists in each stamp would probably be willing to pay that much for one. The covers he signed are probably $100-$150 retail items, Elinor is probably $75, the rest I agree are perhaps half that. A clever dealer with a broad clientele might pull $5000 out of the lot, or possibly a bit more.

You have to read every word:
"Including contemporary copies of sketches for stamp designs"

not the sketches, copies of the sketches.

Contemporary copies are worth nothing, so the lot would be worth maybe $750.

Ugh they're copies! That reduces the value of the collection to no more than $500-$800.

Yes, those sketches looked odd to me. Not like actual pencil drawings.

It's not clear who this collection belonged to, but doesn't appear to be FDR's. He have to be extremely dedicated to continue collecting after his death. It looks more like an accumulation of items, some of which may have been part of Roosevelt's collection at one time.

But getting back to the original topic -- does anyone else have material with the Harmer's rubber stamp indicating it was part of the FDR collection?

Here is a similar one that sold on ebay
http://www.ebay.com/itm/1938-COVER-...381556560501

I am seeing maybe $300 total value for the collection with most of that in the autographs of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and assuming these autographs can be certified as genuine. There would be no way to get that certification until one bought the lot so one would be assuming a big risk in paying very much at all for it. The sketches have no value as they are only copies. The handful of covers are dollar box items that may have a bit of added value if they have the Harmer's rubber stamp on the back saying they are from the Roosevelt "collection" even though these are not the kind of philatelic items that FDR would have ever touched much less actually seen.