George Washington 1 Cent Stamp (Looking Right) On Unused Vintage Postcard

Hello. I am not a stamp collector, though I do appreciate them. I am a garage sale picker. And I am a little long winded, so please bear with me as I give the background info.

At a garage sale this weekend I picked up package of old, unused postcards. It is a set of 25 lithograph images of Washington D.C. buildings made by B.S. Reynolds. I could not find any date markings, but the set looks to be from the 40s. The set of postcards is in the original package. Upon counting the stack I discovered I actually had 26 cards, instead of 25. There was one extra post card not original to the set, but also a lithograph of a Washington D.C. building. This additional post card has a 1 cent George Washington stamp affixed, though the card was never written upon and the stamp is clean/unused. I suspect this extra card was bought at the same time as the 25 card package it was with, a stamp was affixed with intentions of writing and sending to someone, but that never happened and it has lived in an envelop amidst a stack of other past cards for the past several decades.

A little internet sleuthing leads me to believe the stamp is the 1938 George Washington "prexie". I am trying to determine the value of this stamp and postcard specimen. However, the sold comparisons I have found on ebay vary dramatically - from a few dollars to $1700. I have included screenshots of a few examples as well as a few pictures of my item. Ultimately, I come to you with two questions: 1) Why do those ebay sales vary so much? 2) What do you think the stamp and postcard I have is worth?

Thanks for reading this far. I would greatly appreciate any information or feedback.

ebay sold stamps







Pictures of my postcard and stamp

Welcome.
The stamp is worth 1 cent. The ebay listings you are seeing are bogus, the seller ("vinlo5") has zero feedbacks and has relisted the same stamp.
Here is his original listing which 'sold' 203640104090
Here is his new listing 203680211672

Folks can list anything for huge amounts and hope someone comes along and buys it. Even less ethical sellers can 'sell' an item and then cancel the transaction. You have to dig a bit deeper by looking at their feedbacks and see if they are legitimate.

Market value is always determined by two things; supply and demand. The supply of the 1938 1 cent stamp is impacted by the fact they printed over 25 BILLION of them. The demand is not that high now so the market value is pennies. You can learn more about your stamp here https://stampsmarter.org/1847usa/19...ntifier.html

The same thing holds for the postcard, they printed huge quantities of them for the tourist trade and the supply of them far exceeds the demand.
Don

I agree with Don 100%. I would like to add, however, that the value of the stamp on the postcard of the Nat'l Gallery of Art has much more to do with the postcard and the subject of the postcard than of the stamp. I don't collect postcards, so I don't know the value of this particular example, but no matter the value of the postcard, the stamp is worth less. It is a very common stamp.

I have often wondered if obviously astronomically overpriced items such as this could in some way related to money laundering. I see the same thing on Craig's list and can't believe anyone would be taken in by a farce like this so otherwise, I fail to see the seller's benefit in doing this repeatedly.

Thank you for the feedback.