Favorite Cut To Shape

Do we hold these for some reason ?

Why would anyone over the age of 12 do that?

Well umm, when I was 11 , I had developed a slight case of Trypophobia . jk .. I am impressed with the intricate effort . Should I send it for Expertizing or just enter a cts contest ?

Well, it was a nice stamp once.

Lang would call it a rare experimental essay and price it at $2,999.00 plus $5.99 shipping.

In their enthusiasm to dismiss this, maybe some people do not know that in the earliest days of stamp collecting there was no accepted standard for how stamps were to be collected. Cut "squares" were not always cut out as squares but often cut out around the embossed area as circles or whatever they were. Stamps sometimes got the same treatment with collectors wanting the image but not the perforations and so forth. This may be from that era. I doubt it's a modern collector who did this. I'd definitely save this and mount it in an album with a brief explanation of how stamps once were sometimes collected this way. It's not a good idea to dismiss old things if you're not familiar with history, in this case the history of collecting.

This guy needs a haircut . So maybe the trimming was not lingering Trypophobia , but a somewhat normal activity in collecting .

As rev says, in the early days of stamp collecting, the interest lay in the image. That of a stamp was similar to that of any other scrap cut out to go in a scrap-book or early stamp album. The obsession with ancillary matter such as perforations etc was a shift away from this simplicity. These two examples are rather creative.

And in the early days of medical care in Europe, people had holes drilled in their heads to relieve headaches and insanity. Luckily, we have learned more now.
Don

Isn't there a technical medical term for perforation obsession ? Enthusia specificus ..

No, but we like to encourage good stewardship in this community.
Don

I have handled a lot of intact 19th century albums and can say that I have never seen this done to a stamp with a frame as part of the design or a perforated stamp. You will find it rarely done to imperforate stamps that have no frame and Scott actually gives a catalog value for these "cut to shape" stamps. The 1847-48 Queen Victoria stamps of Great Britain are probably the most familiar. Scott #5 for example has a used intact cv of $1000 and a used cut-to-shape cv of $20.

Thanks for the historic and humorous replies . Is the 1 c Magenta also a cut-to-shape ?

No. Cut-to-shape would mean that someone cut it right up to the edge of the design.
Don

This may be the back side of the 1c Magenta cut ?

If it were cut-to-shape it would look like this...


Don