1920 US Consular Service Fee Stamps Used At Malta

I recently purchased a Malta passport from 1920 and it contained the following US consular revenue stamps, cancelled at the US Consulate in Malta on 1 September 1920. They also have an embossed cancellation from the same consulate.



I don't have a catalogue which covers US revenues, but through the website https://www.stamp-collecting-world....onsular.html I think I identified them as Scott RK17 and RK18 (they are perf 11). Can anyone confirm if the website is reliable and if the identification is correct please?

What would be the approximate market value for these stamps used on a document? I suspect that they're not rare (quite a few are available online at the moment) but it would be interesting to know nonetheless.

Cancellations on some countries' consular stamps are sometimes sought after just as much as (if not more than) the actual stamps themselves - the UK comes to mind since a wide variety of cancellations from around the world can be found on its Consular Service stamps. Is this also the case in the US, or do collectors focus only on the stamps rather than the cancellations?

Finally, do any revenue collectors here have US consular stamps used in Malta? It would be great to see other examples!

Any other comments or further information would also be greatly appreciated. :)

The identification is correct. The fee for visas was indeed $9.00.

As to value, most collectors shun those that have embossing. The $2.50 pair is quite off center. The Scott catalog value for VF is $7.20. If they were off document I doubt they are worth more than half catalog. On document I personally would not be interested in if the price was above catalog, even though they were used in Malta. Visas are among the more common uses of the consular fee stamps that survive on document.

The American Revenue Association website has a search capability for their journal and a complete list of uses and rates was published beginning in the November 1968 issue and continuing for at least two more issues.

Thanks for the reply revenuermd!

I bought these partly because I liked the document (even though it has condition issues) and partly because I liked the usage of US revenues at the Malta consulate.

Thanks for pointing out the resources on the American Revenue Association website - I was not aware of them. I looked through the 1968/69 issues and found the articles related to consular fees and they are quite informative. I also randomly looked through some of the other issues and it seems that there is a lot of interesting content.

The best thing about this is that they are pairs, most of the time the usages are single stamps. Multiples, even pairs, are less common.