Hey, Nice Printed Cance... Wait, What?

I spotted this on ebay, and at first glance it looks like a nice 3-line printed or handstamped cancel:



Upon closer examination, it is actually a very meticulously drawn manuscript cancel, to the point of replicating wide and narrow stems and serifs that you would see on a printed cancel.

Horribly overpriced, as it's from a seller whose prices would make Eric and Richard blush, but sometimes you see something that hits all the right aesthetic buttons, and ya just gotta have it!

Well, it IS a beaut!


Peter

There is someone who can make Eric blush about prices? I find that hard to believe.

Guessing his first name is Bill?

Jim

Good guess, but this seller's name is Larry.

Really neat stamp! That seller generally has crazy prices, but I too have purchased from him when he had something I couldn't pass up.

Basic stamp cats 40 cents; I can see this going for 50x cat.

Like I said, horribly overpriced.

Twenty dollars for this cancel isn't really "horribly overpriced". It's certainly the high end of the spectrum, but any dealer who knows something of revenues would charge at least ten anyway.

No, what I meant was that I paid considerably more than that.

Then in my opinion you paid too much. I doubt that you would have had much competition for it at a high price and should have waited him out. Eventually the price would have dropped, unless the dealer preferred to die with it.

That's just it, he doesn't lower his prices. Ahh well, it's only money.

Speaking for myself, a year from now I would still love the stamp and -- as long as I hadn't spent so much I couldn't pay my regular bills -- I wouldn't be bothered by what I paid for it. On the other hand, if I had let it go, there would always be that tinge of regret.

Personally, there was a time that I would have easily paid $100 for this stamp and not thought twice about it.

If you collect early U.S. revenue stamps and their cancels, this is the type of thing that is very rarely encountered.

Once you come across it, you have to consider how much longer it will be before you see another like it. And, of course, how close you are to umm.. no longer being around.

If you've been collecting enthusiastically for a long time, and this is the first occasion that you have been offered an unusual cancellation such as this, then, in my opinion, the sky is the limit.

Sure, if you've seen them from time to time, and you can take your pick whenever you want, then the dealer is obviously trying to put his kids through college.

Imagine the time and care it must have taken to cancel this stamp by someone a century and a half ago, when everyone else at the time would simply scrawl out their initials and the date as fast as they possibly could.

And he/she used red ink, as well.

In this particular field of cancels on revenue stamps, this item is as unique as unique can be.

Jim

My philatelic mentor, the late Ernie Wilkens, said, "You never regret the ones you purchase, only the ones that you didn't.

It is most regretable when one forgets an item that was being auctioned on ebay that one wanted to bid on and later remembers when it is too late and the item went for a ridiculously low price.