Stock Transfer Stamps????

I am new to the stamp world so forgive me if this sounds like a silly question, but as I am slowly making my way through a collection I aquired, I came across a "stock transfer" stamp with a whole bunch of holes. Pics below. Can anyone tell me the purpose of this? Or what it means? Thank you! I tried to google, but, well....we all know how google is...and I couldn't really find anything solid...most pictures I found were without the holes.





*** Moved by Staff to a more appropriate forum. ***

At one time the government taxed stock sales at a non-trivial rate, (political comment) these days the rich in America have fixed it so these taxes are microscopic - the market runs more efficiently, but the national debt could be seriously reduced if these taxes were re-instated. J&Co was (is) Josephthal & Company.

Welcome to the forum . If you want your stamps to stay pristine please do not handle them with bare hands

Peter

"chasa" - Thanks for the reply. I had no idea. So why do some stamps have the holes and some don't? Is it just a year thing? Or?

"Petert4522" Good to know! I had no idea about that either. I literally just acquired this collection a few days ago and I am VERY new to the stamp world...but I love it. Thank you for the information.

Hi novicestamp428,
I moved this thread to 'Back of Book' category; 'Back of Book' refers to the stamps located towards the back of many stamp catalogs. This includes material like the revenue stamps, postal tax stamps, special delivery stamps etc.
Don

The holes in the stamps are called perfins. They would be applied by a company to their stock of stamps, mainly in order to prevent theft of the stamps by employees. Perfins can be found on both postage stamps and revenue stamps (such as your Stock Transfer stamp) of many countries, and they were relatively common from the late 19th to mid/late 20th centuries. There's a Wikipedia article on the topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfin

In this case, the perfin was probably applied to the stamp before it was used (so the perfin would have been applied to the whole sheet). However, there are some cases where revenue stamps on documents were cancelled with perforated cancellations (usually reading "PAID" and the date, sometimes also including a company name or initials). These can be identified since the cancellation would usually be much larger than the stamp, so each stamp would only contain partial text or numbers.

Hi Halfpenny Yellow,
Thank you for the information. I am so excited to keep learning about stamps. I am joyfully exhausted from sorting through all of them and trying to figure out what they mean. This forum is amazing and so helpful! :)

Welcome. There is a glossary link on the upper left of this page. As you read other threads and see a strange word or word in context that makes no sense, check on the philatelic definition. Keep asking questions though.

HalfpennyYellow is correct, but I think one point needs to be clarified. Perforated cancels are not considered to be perfins (short for perforated initials). As such, all perfins would be applied before the stamp is used/affixed.

All holes are not created equal or for the same purpose. Since a picture is worth a thousand words ...

Here is a Josephthal & Co document, front and back scans showing the use of Federal and New York State revenue stamps.





Here is a closeup of the NY stamps, backlit to show the smaller J&Co perfin punched only through the stamps (before application) and the dated perforated cancel punched through both the stamps and the document after application and running off the edge of the stamp to further tie it.

Thank you for the replies! I have learned so much. I found another one, as I am going through these thousands of stamps, that has completely different holes. Such interesting history these stamps are!