My First Wine Stamp "Build Up"

20th century U.S. revenues are a relatively new venture for me, as I'm expanding my interests beyond the Civil Ware era material that has been my focus since I started collecting U.S. revenues. My collection of 20th century material is... well... appalling actually.

I've been dabbling a bit in the REs (wine) and RFs (playing cards) recently, but have none of the scarcer items. I had none of the large format wine stamps with tabs (RE56-59 and the MUCH scarcer RE107A-107D).

I was aware of the build-ups mentioned in Scott and seen examples at auction. I've been looking for them "in the wild" in hopes of finding an example (preferably without the dealer realizing what it was) but thus far had come up bupkis.

Well, one showed up on ebay last week. Sadly, the dealer knew what it was, so no steal to be had, but between Best Offer and a 15%-Off ebay coupon I managed to get it considerably below full retail.

It's an RE56 ($20) with 4 imperf $2 attached, totalling $28 in tax. It is in lovely condition with no pinholes, and a wonderful strike of the cancel on the topmost $2.

It matches exactly the example shown in the exhibit displayed on Richard Frajola's website (see page 5), down to the exact cancel and date:

http://www.rfrajola.com/wines/wines.htm

In fact my RE56 (serial # 355) immediately precedes the example shown in the exhibit.

It is highly unlikely that I'll be able to put together the RE57-59 also as build-ups, as I just don't see them out there, whether at auction or through Richard and Eric. So I'm content to have at least one example showing the build-up.

Nice find!

I've been looking for these for ages and, of course, the week I don't scan ebay for it, it shows up.

Congratulations.

Congrats - great score!

Very, very nice, dang it....

As I recall anything other than the $20, RE56, built up with additional stamps are rare. I recorded four of the $50 and only one of the $40. Don't think I have a $100. I will have to dig into my records this coming week. I certainly have more than ten of the built-up $20's in my collection, the most interesting from during Prohibition (albeit they are in less than pristine condition as they were used on barrels of sacramental wine). The pristine ones like the one that Dan shows were placed with import documents in New York, which were subsequently sent to Washington for destruction, only to be rescued by the pioneer first day cover servicer, C.E. Worden of Milburn, New Jersey.