Today was day 1 of the Indiana Stamp Club Spring Fair. I set off at about 6:00am my time for the drive out from behind the iron curtain of the Peoples Republic of Illinois to smell the sweet, sweet air of freedom... or is that field fertilizer? Who can tell...
A bright sunny April day that would eventually wind up in the mid-80s temperaturewise, it was a lovely day for a road trip.
I had touched base with Denny Peoples a few days ago, and knew that he was bringing some material he was holding for me, since I didn't attend the St. Louis Stamp Expo. I got to the show about a half hour before the show opened, paid my club dues, and while I was waiting for the show to open, Denny brought me out some material he had just purchased.
Oy...
Rick Scott (The Stamp Shop) had purchased a large collection from a local collector, and sold the revenue/ephemera portion of the collection to Denny. The theme of the entire collection was proprietary medicine. Stamps, documents, wrappers, trade cards, advertising, proofs, essays, you name it. Far more collateral items than actual stamped items, but an amazing range of material. 4 large binders of material.
Far too rich for me to consider buying in its entirety, but I spent several times what I had expected to spend at the show. Another collector put aside a pile even larger than mine. It was a bit of a feeding frenzy, but you gotta get when the getting's good.
Most of what I purchased, other than a few somewhat expensive wrappers, were a wide range of billheads from various and sundry medicine retailers and manufacturers. I need to get moving on actually working on that 19th century billhead image database...
So if proprietary medicine items are of any interest and you're in the Indianapolis area, the show is open tomorrow (see post in the show calendar section of the forum).
While not my particular area (one can only collect/hoard so much), one portion of the collection that Rick still has is a large box of proprietary medicine-related advertising covers... hundreds and hundreds of them, so if that material is of any interest, you may want to contact him directly.
I bought a couple of railroad billheads from Jim Bardo, a 30-piece lot of billheads directly from Rick, but everything else (both money and time) was spent with Denny... par for the course.
I then spent the rest of the day shopping various locations of Half Price Books and numerous thrift stores in Indianapolis, hunting scarce/out-of-print music CDs for my
ebay business before heading home.
And now I have 100+ documents to scan and write up... as if I don't already have hundreds if not thousands already in a backlog.
How the heck did I ever have time to work a fulltime job? I don't appear to have gained any time by retiring...
Posted 04/15/2023 9:01 pm
