Non-Descript But Outstanding 1959 Postage Due Cover - Which I Forgot To Buy

Oh Bart, come on now! That is a ridiculously myopic take.

You are blinded by your philatelic acumen and missing the forest for the trees.

Short answer: People save sh*t.

Long answer:

I go to a lot of thrift stores, garage sales, flea markets, antique stores, etc. You have no idea the boxes and piles of just general correspondence people save over the years, not out of any collecting pretense, but just out of habit. Add to that the number of people that are just hoarders in general. My mother saves correspondence forever just because she might want to refer to it "someday". She never even looks at the stamps, postmarks, etc. The philatelic aspects are utterly meaningless... but she saves it nonetheless.

There are mountains of aging commercial and personal mail out there waiting to be sifted through by anyone with a philatelic bent. Most of it ends up in landfills or incinerators because no stamp collector ever has the opportunity to look at it first.

"If it still exists, it must be philatelic"... good grief.

A 16-year old would not understand the nuance of the rate rarity as we do now, Monday morning quarterbacking with the Beecher & Wawrukiewicz rate books. To venture another Occam's razor scenario, this might be a prank among two friends of "Let's mail him a letter without postage and make him pay to get it." We'll never the know.

There are any number of plausible, simple scenarios why anyone would get a letter or to save it. For all those who want to call this "philatelic", I say "So what, believe what you wish". It still does not diminish the rarity. Go find another. Henry Beecher sent himself many pieces of controlled mail to get unusual rates. Without controlled mail, many of these would not exist.

And lastly for those who believe this cover is philatelic, I will repeat my earlier request to have you describe in detail exactly what features would be different on a "legitimate" commercial cover showing this same due rate.



Then logically as a revenue example, only revenue stamp collectors would have saved their bank statement in 1900 wrapped around their stack of canceled checks bearing revenue stamps.

What I see here is that the people with some kind of stake in it, either because they specifically wish they owned it or because it falls in their general postal history collecting interest all think it must be genuine and cannot possibly be created. I have no stake in that.
1. I have no desire to own it; that is not my motivation.
2. If it was something like the roster for a team, then that might well have been saved. In that case the cover would be likely to have an enclosure. But it does not.
3. Revenues on checks in the 19th century were overwhelmingly business items, which would have been saved for tax and other purposes. And there were a lot of people collecting back at that time and recovering everything they could from what was disposable.
4. The fact that it was mailed to a teen does not mean that the teen created it, only that he received it. And his possibly not knowing the nuances of scarce rates does not mean that an older collector might have some idea that it would be nice to have. Even if he was not totally aware of everything about it.
5. It's always nice to find unusual usages, but I see nothing about this cover that proves it was a legitimate mailing rather then something created. Too many questions, and too many assumptions by those who want it to be good.

You still haven't put forth the specifics that indicate the cover itself being manufactured other than "I don't know why anyone would have saved it."

Earlier in the thread I have.

Because people do dumb sh*t all the time. Or they're forgetful. Or they're in a rush. Or they mistakenly thought that a local letter didn't need a stamp. Any number of simple answers.

I know that we as revenue stamp and document collectors are used to extensive context on items, being able to nail down specific reasons why something was done, as contextual information was included when being filed for long-term storage and possible future legal or accounting scrutiny. With postal history there are far more cases where "it simply is". The postage due was assessed without the need for a clerk to write chapter and verse as to why, or required to make additional auxiliary markings as to the reason(s) why. That wasn't the norm, or required.




Au contraire... you seem to be going out of your way to want it to not be genuine. Rather than taking the Occam's Razor approach, you seem to think that a contorted contrivance is more likely than a simple answer.




(emphasis added.)

Is there a possibility that it is contrived? Sure. But without being able to look inside the sender's mind and see their actual intent, ascribing or imputing motive appears to be more than a little bit of a leap. Framing uncertainty as "every sign of being contrived" is severely overstating the case, IMO. I don't see enough "there" there. It seems to be more intellectually convoluted to come up with the case for being philatelic than the case for its genuine use.

Bart, And no doubt if one finds a check dated 1899 or 1900 without any stamp to pay the revenue, then by your reasoning, it must be philatelic too.

To everyone else, Isn't it time to stop arguing the points which are all obvious to us? I'm done wallowing in the mud over this.

Sure they do. That MIGHT happen. But using that as a reason to claim it genuine????? So you are using guesswork to prove it real.




Is it? I am saying there is not enough evidence to prove it a genuine commercial use; everyone else is saying there is not enough evidence to prove it philatelic. To me, given the time period involved, it screams philatelic. If no one else agrees, so be it.

I think that determining 'intent' is very often thin ice. Even with someone as close to me as my wife, I try to not assume I know her intent on any particular behavior.

I have avoided stepping onto this thin ice for the past 43 years, no doubt that this is one reason we are still together.
Don

Anyway, really cool cover now that I understand it. Even better is learning of the town of Independence. What a gem. A place I would LOVE to visit.

If you do visit Independence, go to the high school library and check the yearbook to see if John was in the stamp club. If he was, I'm not sure we know much more, but, if he wasn't...?

ETD: removed a sentence that was no longer in context...

So, out of curiosity what kind of monetary value would be placed upon the cover?

Parcelpostguy, when you think about it, the chances are not negligible that your item's buyer does a little googling upon receipt of the item and finds this thread...you may get a second chance at this item, after all.

Sigh.
I really did not want to participate in Moderating these kinds of threads anymore and instead let Bobby and Kirk run with them. But they have not been online this afternoon and this has gone on long enough.

I have selectively removed the gun related posts at request of the thread starter.
And since if I post something like "restarting more off-topic post will result in me locking the thread" could end up in someone vindictively doing it, I'll try putting a stop to it the nonsense this way...

If anyone restarts with more off-topic crap in this thread I will lock your account for 3 days. I will be the judge and jury in deciding what is and isn't 'crap' and/or 'off-topic'.
Don

the thread is going nowhere anyway - neither side can prove their theory