1934 National Parks Series And 1935 Farley Reprints

Please continue! I have been reading it with great interest.

The modern add-on cachet on the 4 cent is by Melissa Fox, signed as a stylized MFox

Scott 744

The next stamp in the series is the five cent blue stamp featuring the geyser "Old Faithful" in Yellowstone National Park.

The primary vignette for the design is based upon a photograph supplied to the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. This is shown below:








The design process created two essays. These differed primarily in the tablet design at the bottom of the stamp. I've included an issued stamp for comparison.









As with the other photographic essays, these came from the collection of the Director, Bureau of Engraving and Printing, Alvin Hall. The following two pages are from that collection.







One of the difficulties with this issue is finding well centered plate blocks. I'm not certain why, but the BEP was having a hard time lining up the perforators on this issue. Here's an example of a well centered plate block. Note that this is about as good as it gets for this issue:





The final topic are the First Day Covers. The following two covers are specific to this issue, not the series.

The first cover is listed in the Planty-Mellone catalog of First Day Covers as 744-20. It features an image of Old Faithful and the name of the park and is unattributed as to designer.





The second cover is listedin the Planty-Mellone catalog as 744-29. While this may have been thought as a generic design for the series, as no mention of a specific park is made, it only appears with the five cent Yellowstone stamp.





Next up will be Scott 745, the six cent stamp in the series.

Love it. Keep them coming. Never been to Yellowstone. This is my trip. What a geyser.

Marvelous material. Beautiful!

I live in Canada and thought my collection was good, please continue as you are answering many of the questions that I have. Wish I had som of those covers!

Scott 745

The next stamp in the series is the six cent Crater Lake stamp. The image used to create the design is shown below:





This was used to create a single essay. The following is the photographic essay, along with the information sheet, from the Director, Bureau of Engraving and Printing's collection:









Here's an example of the issued stamp, to use for comparison with the essay:





In discussing the previous issue, the five cent Yellowstone Park issue, I had stated the difficulty in finding well centered plate blocks. The six cent issue seems to have less of a problem with centering as the following two plate blocks demonstrate. The first image is a top plate block with the "F" registration:





The next plate block shows how closely the bottom margin is on these issues. This is actually a large bottom margin, as I've seen many plate blocks where the plate number is partially cut off at bottom.






This issue, at six cents, was used primarily to pay the domestic airmail rate of the period. The following is an interesting advertising cover using the stamp in the period:





Finally, to continue the First Day Covers for this series, I've selected a group to share with you.

The first cover is another of the hand-tinted covers created by Clara H. Fawcett. I really like these FDC's:





There are a few FDC's where were created for one stamp in the series and not used on any others. Sometimes, the cachet maker was known to the catalog editors to have made cachets for other stamps in the series, but not for all of them. The first cover falls into that category. It should be listed in Planty-Mellone as 745-19, as it is in the same format as other 1st design A.A. Heller cachets, but it isn't. I'm finding there are a LOT of covers not listed in Planty-Mellone. Here's the cover I believe to be an extension of the known issues by A.A. Heller. Let me know if you agree!





The next cover is one of the former types, issued only for a single denomination and no others. This is listed in Planty-Mellone as being the 1st Myron F. McCamley cachet, 745-22:





Last, I have two covers with the same basic design, but issued in two different colors for the same stamp. When working with FDC's of the period, it is necessary to pay very close attention to detail. Again, this stamp was used primarily for airmail. The first example of the Top Notch cachet is in orange, with no marking for airmail use:





This second example, again by Top Notch, changes the color of the outer ring of the cachet to blue and added the AIR MAIL at right to the cachet. There is no listing of the variety in the catalog:





I hope you continue to enjoy these listings. Comments and questions are always welcome!

Next, I'll discuss the seven cent issue for Acadia National Park.

I have been holding this aside until you got to the 6 cent value. Registered cover with 1-6 cent values paying the 3 cent letter rate and the 18 cent registry fee for $5.01-$25.00 indemnity.

Keep this going! I collect the 1 cent National Parks in all the varieties, with plans to expand to the other values. I'm loving the information!

John,

I love that cover! It is a magnificent use of the six values of the National Parks series. Now, I'm going to have to find one like it!

Welcome to the family camper40! I will continue through the entire series, then into the Reprints. Stay tuned!

If you have any specific questions, please feel free to ask me. I'm happy to help where I can.

Scott 746

The next stamp in the National Parks series, value-wise, is the seven cent Acadia National Park stamp. The stamp was issued in black color as that was the standard color under Universal Postal rules for the denomination (look at the color of seven cent stamps since the first Washington-Franklin was issued!).

The central vignette came from a picture provided to the Bureau of Engraving and Print by the Department of the Interior, shown below:




Now for the great material! There were more essays created for this design than any other in the series - ten in total. I've included an image of the issued stamp for comparison. The following are the photograph essays for the Acadia National Park stamp:




Note that this first image actually shows Ranier, not Acadia.
















Nicely centered plate blocks do exist but I've noted there seems to be a good deal of ragged perforations on this issue that I've not noted on others in the series. I'm not sure what the cause is, or if I've just seen a series of hundreds of plate blocks with less than clean perforations. I suspect the pins in the perforators were wearing out, but that is just conjecture on my part at this point.
Further research will be needed. If anyone has any knowledge of this, I'd love to hear about it.

Here are two examples of well centered plate blocks:






A sampling of FDC's for this issue follow next.

The first item is another of the attractive Clara H. Fawcett hand tinted covers.







One of the major cachet makers whose work I have not shown before is Bates. This is their cachet for the Acadia National Parks issue:







Some of the cachet makers issued their cachets in colors specific to the issue with a generic format, such as the one shown below, designed by Ralph Dyer for the Washington Stamp Exchange:




Here's the same image in orange-red but with the Acadia stamp on it:




Given the overall scarcity of the covers with mismatched colors, I feel this was probably an error, not a conscious attempt at creating varieties. The fact that this exists is not mentioned in Planty-Mellone at all.

The next issue will be the eight cent Zion National Parks issue, Scott 747.

Scott 747

The next stamp, sequentially in value order, is the Zion National Park eight cent sage green stamp.

The first item is the source photo for the design, shown here:




There are three essays which were in the Director, Bureau of Engraving and Printing files. These are shown here. An example of the issued stamp is shown first, for comparison.







As mentioned above, these all came from the Director, BEP collection. The information sheet, providing production information, along with the album page for the stamps is shown below.





I've talked about some of the previous issues and the difficulty in finding well centered plate blocks. This issue is a moderately difficult one, but they are out there. Because the value increases with the larger denominations, it sometimes seems they are more plantiful (both well centered and not-so-well centered) than the lower face values in the series.

Here is the complete set of the plate blocks for Plate Number 21324, one of the four plates used to create this issue.






Another area I've made a slight mention of is the existence of precancel stamps from this series. These are almost all likely favor cancels. I have not yet seen one legitimately used on a non-philatelic cover but would love to see an image if anyone has one.

This is the Chicago, Illinois precancel (PSS Type L-24).




The following selections of First Day Covers are provided to round out the Zion National Park issue.

The first one is a very attractive and scarce hand tinted Parsons cachet. This is listed in Planty-Mellone as 747-9.




Next are two beautiful examples of the Clara H. Fawcett cachet. While often minor differences in tinting are visible with a little study, anyone should be able to see the strikingly different color applications used here. These are listed in Planty-Mellone as 747-13.





The last two items again show that the cachet maker's sometimes used more than one color for the monotone cachets. The following two examples again demonstrate this. Both are A.C. Roessler cachets.





The next stamp to be discussed will be the nine cent Glacier National Park stamp.

I really enjoy looking over all the information you posted.

Jim Zim,

Welcome to the Stamp Community Family! I'm glad to hear you enjoy looking at this material. Keep coming back as the best is yet to come!