Another Clueless Ebay Seller Who Mis-Identified And Lived To Profit

This one sold for 153 $ and was worth it. I am sure the seller was pleasantly surprised. If the seller had done a buy-it-now for full Scotts he would have left 150$ on the table.

Do you mean he paid US$150 over the Scott price ??????? Thanks

Yes, this is a rare precancel, and never reported on this denomination before.

ouch! Had to hurt-but hey when you say 'never seen before' or 'rarely seen' they seem to come running as fast as they can. The seller must be very happy---

And a clueless ebay buyer -- caveat emptor.

And another clueless ebay buyer -- caveat emptor.

The last posters missed the point here. This was valuable stamp and the seller had no idea. Knowledgeable bidders bailed him out from making a big mistake.

I concur, if the stamp is legitimate someone got a nice stamp at a good price.
Don

I know very little about US precancels, but this stamp looks suspiciously like a modern ink-jet overprint.

Or the kind of preinked stamp you can order online from Vistaprint for $8.

chasa, who is probably THE precancel expert, saw no problem with the stamp.

Is there an "official" list of denominations used with precancels, or is this a checklist type item?

This would be the place to start:

http://www.precancels.com/


Legitimate is the key word here. Does legitimate mean it was produced in quantity and actually used commercially in the mails ? Or does legitimate mean the precancel was actually made by the same stamp that was used on other "legitimate" more common denominations ? I believe some of these are referred to as "favor" precancels.

Same scenario exists in the Vending & Affixing machine stamps. A good percentage of those listed in the Scott catalog are marked as "request" items. They were actually perforated by the various Vending machine companies, but were never intended to be used commercially in their machines. They were made to supply the philatelic market.

If that's not confusing enough, then throw on top of that 100 years of outright fabrications meant to deceive collectors.

The US Precancel Stamp Society [PSS] publishes reference books on precancels. One of the recent ones is the Catalog of Classic Precancels. It comes in 3 parts, Part I [2011] is pre-1908, Part IIa [2014] is 1908-21 states A-M, Part IIb [2015] is states N-W. For this era they have listings with evaluations for every denomination known. A lot of research has gone into these listings. This is the first nationwide listing of these since the Hoover catalog of 1940. Precancels listed can be considered 'legitimate'. Denominations of the underlying stamps are individually priced and the pricing is considered fair retail by most. This cancel is only listed on the 1c, 5c, and 6c of 1908, so the 4c is a new find, unknown since the Cubs last won the world series. The 1c and 6c are listed at $175, the 5c is listed, unpriced which means we think they exist but none were vetted when producing this catalog.
Of course this could be an Vistaprint job, but the scan has been shown around the hobby and everybody thinks it is genuine.
Precancels are fun and occasionally profitable.