My Cover Box Interesting Finds

I have a couple of boxes with hundreds of covers that occasionally on a rainy day I'll poke though.

Every time I go through the box I find something interesting so I thought I'd start a thread with some.

This one is just a plain looking 4th bureau 1¢ so never gave it a 2nd look.





Finally giving it a 2nd look, it looks like a vending machine coil with a strange knife cut?




Then it unfolds to this vibrant almost 100 year old color picture





Then that unfolds into what looks like a cleaning company ad mailer.





Thought it was kind of neat. Find odd things like this every time I go through the box.

Vending machine coil or just someone gone cray-cray with a scissor or knife? That doesn't look like a vending machine cut to me, although that isn't an area of expertise for me at all.

Love the art deco design work.

I have all sorts of boxes of covers, both U.S. and worldwide, with stuff I've pulled out of carton lots I got from Denny or Apfelbaum that I'll likely never do anything with, but I too like to go through them... censored covers, unusual countries, advertising covers, etc.

Timely thread though: One carton lot I've just been going through the last week caused me to wonder why don't more people collect postal cards, postal reply cards, etc. While the U.S. designs are bland and boring, some of the various cards issued in the 19th and early 20th centuries by both European countries and Latin American countries are absolutely beautiful. Ornate designs with scrolled framework, many printed in multiple colors. Yet any time I've heard a dealer refer to postal cards (and postal stationery in general) it's always in desparaging tones, usually recoiling in horror. They *LOATHE* that material. Nobody wants it... yet it's beautiful. I realize that the lack of current catalogs is a barrier to entry (both Kessler and Higgins & Gage catalogues are long out of date), but I would think that more people would collect them...

Not a vending machine cut, but rather an affixing machine cut. See this thread:
http://goscf.com/t/69080
Note the identical curve to both the left and right cuts. Your copy shows one of the more pronounced cuts I have seen. This topic comes up about once a year.

Thanks for the refresher John Becker, that was an excellent post, very informative.

Must have been that post that got me on track to being cut by other than scissors with the matching sides.

Interesting. Are the various affixing machine cuts listed or differentiated in Scott (or any other reference) like vending machine perforations are, or are there too many variants and/or not sufficiently definitive patterns?

I haven't seen anything in Scott. They do seem to be common.

Assuming the same on this one?








*Edit* Adding in back

These coils passed through privately-purchased affixing machines made in multiple models by multiple companies. Adjusted and mal-adjusted by mail-room clerks and secretaries, using stamps from the beginning and end of the roll, etc. Essentially impossible to attribute any stamp to a specific affixer. And well beyond Scott's listings if identification were possible. Overall, very common and often considered damaged stamps since they rarely cut exactly down the row of perforations.