Oh, The Humanity! Such A Travesty...

To quote Steve Buscemi from the movie Armageddon: "Wow, this is a goddamn Greek tragedy."

Not only did someone completely ravage documents cumulatively worth over a thousand dollars in today's market, but they didn't even care that they ripped through stamps in the process.

What might have been some incredible exhibition pieces have been reduced to mere curiosities of nominal value.

The combination usages with the Great Britain revenues, especially the one including the Nevada state revenue stamp would have been fabulous!

Sigh.

As a revenue stamp collector*, that image was actually painful to look at.

(shudder).

Jim

* (me).

Probably wasn't a collector. More likely someone cleaning out and destroying old files. Still painful.

Ugh!

The cynic here says it could be even worse than that, ripped out of bound documents in a library or archive. They look rather hastily done/done in. Civilians often have no concept of faulty being bad as James Drummond has shown us many times on ebay sales.

Which reminds me of a story that will drive most readers to other posts. A friend was working up in California gold country (1970s?) and decided to advertise for Pony Express covers while he was there. He got a call from a lady saying she had two(!). So the guy dutifully went over and found they were genuine (I think) $2 values on cover. After a little haggling, he pulled out cash from his boot (no messing around) but the lady decided she wanted a washer and dryer instead and not the cash to buy them.

As he left to get them, he told the lady to leave the covers in a safe place until he got back. Took him a couple of days to get the free time to buy the washer and dryer and haul it over in his pickup. Meeting him at the door, she then told him that she had the stamps checked out and that they were real. She showed him the now butchered stamps she had roughly torn off the envelopes to show to whoever that was. Back went the washer and dryer.

As a young stamp collector age 8 I had no one to teach me things. In fact as far as I know I was the only person ever interest in my immediate or extended family. Thus every old piece of mail was cut then soaked. My grand parents had a lot of old mail and it didn't matter I just wanted the stamp.

Today I save every piece of mail to a fault. I have more of an issue with storing it all.

Thus at the young tender age of 8 I could see me doing this. I mean only the stamp had value to me what did I want with all that extra paper.