mcgees.org

I can highly recommend, to US buyers, the oddly-named Vera Trinder, self-described as “London’s Oldest Stamp Accessory Store”, for philatelic literature.  They have relatively low prices, good coverage, and exceptional service.

Watch your checkbook, though: the merchant is completely honest, to be sure, but the current exchange rate (plus “international fees” on your credit card) leaves much to be desired (when importing — it has been a boon while selling on eBay!)

eBay seller internationalcovers has some awesome covers for sale right now.

No kickback, just thought the cover collectors would like to know.

Stories about the rigors of life in Germany are plentiful.  Economic disaster ensued when the Allied Reparation Commission required Germany to pay a whopping 132 billion gold marks in reparations for World War 1 — Janet Klug, Linn’s Stamp News, 25 February 2008.

Whopping?  132 billion gold marks sounds like a lot, but so does 132 billion Turkish “old” Lira.  This is an example of the type of  information searches philately spurs:

What’s was the buying power of 132 billion gold marks in 1921?  A thousand homes?  The Louvre?  All of Liechtenstein?

Let’s start with a Google search for germany inflation 1923 wikipedia and look at the first match:

The total reparations demanded was 132,000,000,000 gold marks which was far more than the total German gold or foreign exchange.  An attempt was made by Germany to buy foreign exchange, but that was paid in treasury bills and commercial debts for Marks which only increased the speed of devaluation.

Um, OK.  You bill the country more than its entire net worth?  Had no idea.  Yikes.  The article also states:

The German currency was relatively stable at about 60 Marks per US Dollar during the first half of 1921.

Have I mentioned I love Google?  People were talking about the “Information Age” decades ago, but Google has gotta define it.  Anyway, a search for dollar historical buying power in Google, and, again, the first match: Historical Currency Conversions.  A little division, and we put “2 billion 200 million” into the form, and choose “dollars” (yes, you can spell out your amounts like that.)  The answer: 4.7 x 10¹⁸ (4.7E18) dollars in today’s buying power!

This post will be useful for students, so I will avoid profanity at this moment.  But, man!  That’s almost 5 sextillion dollars!  The U.S. GDP (thanks, Google!) was 13 trillion in 2006.  That’s 350,000 years’ worth of the U.S. economy!

Someone please tell me I made a decimal point error somewhere, or that the people at Historical Currency Conversions are full of it.  Sextillions of dollars?

Forget Liechtenstein!  There’s not a continent you couldn’t buy for that kind of money!

What were “we” thinking?  Did we really think this wouldn’t trigger another, worse war?

Ooh, burn!  The Post Office claims overnight Express Mail service to “most areas”.  I could understand it not being available from small town to small town, but not between two major U.S. city ZIP Codes, 99775 and 96815!  They’re even both in the high 90,000s!  Sure, you can drop off your package at the origin until 7:00 p.m., but it won’t end up at the destination until 10:00 a.m., two whole days later!

Actually, that’s really frakking amazing, when you look it up.  Wow.

(What, the government-kinda?  Really, they can do that?  I’ll let you in on a little GAO secret: the USPS’s biggest contractor is FedEx.  No kidding.  FedEx planes fly Express Mail.)

(USPS Web Apps: Express Mail Commitments)

Gently!

Check out the article on the elephants in the room regarding the current state of philately.  Nothing new, but a good summary.

Want to trade stamps?  Check out my Stamp Trading Offers.

I’m going to introduce you to my favorite United States commemorative stamp.  Here it is.  I hope you will forgive the huge image:

Isn’t that drool-worthy?  It is printed by a type of recess printing technically known as intaglio.  A master artist takes weeks — sometimes months — with a scribing tool on a piece of copper.  There is no room for error.  He works in mirror-image.  Everywhere he scratches, there will ink be deposited.  Every place left unscratched, there the color of the paper will show through.

In this style of stamp, which is called frame and vignette, the artist cuts two plates: in this case, the one that takes the scarlet ink, and the one that takes the black ink.

How it works is this: the frame plate is inked all over with a wool (or these days, synthetic) roller.  The ink gets both into the crevices and onto the smooth copper.  Then, a sharp blade, called a doctor blade, squeegees the surface of the plate.  The flat areas are now devoid of ink, but the ink remains in the crevices.  High-quality paper is wet, then pressed under enormous pressure against the engraving plate by another plate or roller.  The paper is literally squeezed into the crevices, where it picks up the ink.  It is allowed to dry, and then the same process is repeated with the vignette, or image inside the frame.

The plates are extremely expensive to make, they wear out (so there have to be duplicates — don’t worry, the engraving usually only happens once, and is mechanically repeated through a process I can explain if anyone cares), they have to be replaced — lots of costs.  Coupled with the very low number of people skillful enough to do this, and the salaries they can command, this is an extremely expensive way to make stamps, and is only very rarely used these days.

You can always tell an intaglio stamp, by (carefully!) dragging the back edge of a fingernail across the stamp.  Every tiny line will register as a bump.  It’s exquisite.  It’s true art.

This stamp, an oversized issue for the day (about 40mm × 31mm), and even then a rarity in two colors, is amazing.  Why this topic, George Rogers Clark’s capture of a British fort 150 years prior, was chosen for this honor, and not, say, the sesquicentennial of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, is beyond me.  But they did it.

Hold on, the story gets better.  As was the custom, when this stamp was being produced, each plate was numbered.  The numbers are printed by the plates in the waste paper around the block of stamps, or selvedge.  Twelve frame plates were engraved, twelve vignette plates were engraved, and all 144 combinations exist.  More interestingly, they are all approximately the same rarity.  To spice things up even more, there are plate blocks from the left and right of the sheet, which was cut into two panes for resale.  The left side has the word “Top” on the selvedge above one stamp in scarlet, then the plate numbers (in their appropriate colors; they are after all deposited by the plate) above two more stamps.  They are collected in 3×2 blocks.  On the right side, the word “Top” is in black above one of the steps, and the order of the plate numbers is reversed, and the letter “F” appears next to each plate.  So all told, there are 288 collectible plate blocks, all of which exist, all of which are obtainable, and all of which are pretty cheap.

If you’ve wondered how someone can devote a lifetime of study to one single stamp, here is an example.  If someone completes the plate blocks, he could then start examining mis-registrations (or other freaks), or plate flaws, or different plate states.  He could obtain trial proofs, india paper proofs, and printer’s waste.  He could probably win a major award at an exhibition with a study of this one stamp.

I collect plate blocks of this issue.  Here is my checklist at the moment:

I have a whole album, with a slipcase, devoted to this one issue.  Stop by and see it some time.

As you can see, I have a ways to go.  I’m only 15% of the way there.  They’re all out there.  Wish me luck.

Children’s literature is an odd market.  Children (and I can attest to this) do not treat their books well.  A first-edition Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in boards is worth a lot.  In a pristine dust jacket, it’s worth more than ten times as much.  Nine-tenths of the value of the book is in its wrapper, which was intended to be ephemeral in the first place (dust jackets were a originally a convenience for shopkeepers, and it was expected that they would be thrown away when the book was put on a shelf.)  Now let’s say I have one very nice first printing of Alice without a dustjacket, and a later printing with the same dustjacket.  Tempting, no, to take the dj from the latter and put it on the former?  The euphemism in the rare books world for this practice is sophistication.  If you’re reading a book dealer’s catalogue, and it refers to a volume as a sophisticated copy, the dealer is not saying it’s astute or for sophisticated people.  He’s saying it’s faked.  It’s an old-time, honest dealer who will admit that, as the practice is frowned upon.  And it is, in general, very hard to detect.

Think that’s insane?  Quick: what’s the most valuable thing on the planet, by weight?  Silver?  Gold?  Platinum?  Saffron?  Uranium 235?  Locks of Lord Nelson’s hair?  No, it’s arguably postage stamp gum.  You know that “thin glutinous wash” (as Rowland Hill, the inventor of the postage stamp, described it) that’s supposed to be, essentially, licked off?  If it’s a relatively modern stamp, like Edwardian British Colonies, it contributes — as a rule of thumb — 95% of the value of the stamp.  If it’s a real classic?  Original gum (or “OG”, amusingly) can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.  So why don’t people just paint on some gum?  People do.  All the time.  It’s called “regumming”, and most estimates (by the few people who will admit to knowing the price) put the practice at $5 per stamp.  This, also, is hard to prove.  You have to put the perforations of the stamp under a powerful microscope to see if there are any torn fibers with gum on them, which of course would be impossible in a normal stamp.  You have to have the perfs checked, all of them, by a trained expert with a microscope, who then vouches for the stamp’s integrity, frequently insuring his opinion with actual monetary guarantees if he’s proven wrong.  Who gives a shit?  Almost everyone.  No one buys a gummed stamp for more than $1000 these days without submitting it for “expertizing”.  For a cheap stamp, that will run you $35 per stamp, minimum, and take months — more and longer for pricey stamps.  There are even people — “nutters”, let’s say (there’s no official term) — who buy expensive stamps, have them professionally mounted and framed, and display them gum side out.

And you thought the fervor over uncreased tush tags was silly.

Recently, there have been a rash of reported scuffed, horizontal tears that vertically bisect the postage stamps on domestic U.S. mail.  It can appear as a scuff, a tear, or a scratch, but invariably shows up as a ragged white line across the middle of the stamps.

They are caused by automatic mail processing equipment used by the USPS, specifically facing and canceling equipment.  The USPS claims the devices are not malfunctioning, that this an occasional part of their normal operation.

The good news: I’m buying them for a modern mail philatelic exhibit.  If you have these, if the tops aren’t too ragged (opened by a letter opener is best, tears on the stamps from opening the letter are a no-go), send them to me unfolded in a slightly larger envelope (keep it no larger than 11 1⁄2″ × 6 1⁄8″ to save you money) and I’ll send you $1 face in mint U.S. postage for each.  If you’re sending US letters addressed overseas, make it a U.S. International Reply Coupon with a clear CDS (to redeem, keep, or sell) each.  Limit 3 per address.

Send to:

McGee
ATTN: Scuffed Stamps
3763 E Colorado Blvd # 151
Pasadena CA  91107-3808

Email me at stamps (at) mcgees (dot) org if you want references or my American Philatelic Society membership number.

Please don’t fake them.  I have enough exemplars to make it clear which are authentic, and/but if I were to miss one, it would decrease the quality of my exhibit.

Glen Stephens is a Sydney-based stamp dealer.  He claims to have the most-visited stamp website in the Southern hemisphere, to be the largest stamp dealer in the Southern hemisphere, to be the largest stamp buyer in Sydney, and, I believe, to have cured polio.

It was he who offered the $500 prize that I described on this page.  It started at $200, but he made a post where he said if the thread reached 10,000 posts, he would up it to $500.

At 5,000 posts, he started a new thread because of “stability” issues.  The second thread met the 10,000 mark.

He is not honoring the $500 prize because “the thread” did not meet 10,000 posts — the thread that he closed.

Glen, as you might have guessed by now, has always had a gruff demeanor, high-pressure sales tactics, and an ego larger than his continent.  I always figured there was a heart of gold underneath.  I have long contended that stamp dealers fall neatly into two bins: those to whom you would entrust your house keys, and those you would cross the street to avoid.  Despite early warnings (such as charging obscene amounts for Machin booklets that were covered with pencil writing, which is inexcusable to not mention) I’ve given him chance after chance.  And it was a waste.

He posted on the site telling me that if I was not satisfied with the $200 prize, he could surely find a runner-up who would be.  Good for him.  Have fun, Glen.  May I suggest Waroff49?  I’m not intimidated by his threats, and I’m not intimidated by his deletion of my posts calling him on it.  I imagine that deletion of my user account will follow.  Such is to be expected from slimeballs.

The site is stampboards.com.  May I strongly recommend you do not visit?

For the search engines: “Glen Stephens sucks”.

Farewell, stamp boarders.  It’s been a pleasure knowing (most) of you.

I just won $500 in a private Australian lottery.  I got an email and everything!

No, really.  It sounds like a joke, but I’m A$500 richer.

Wow, this is a nice item, but I didn’t think it was $76 worth of nice.  I bid about a third of that.  [archive]

My good friend Marcus has a site selling philatelic covers.  It is Naval Cover Shop.

The designer of the site has mad skills, BTW.

Were the rates for postcards eliminated?
No, postcards are part of First-Class Mail International. The rates for eligible cards will be 69 cents to Canada and Mexico; 52 cents to the Marshall Islands and Micronesia; and 90 cents to all other countries. Remember, for postcard rates, cards can be no larger than 4-1/4 by 6 inches.

Dumbasses.  The question is obviously “were lower rates for postcards eliminated?”  And the answer is, “Yes.”

If you are mailing items from the US to other countries, or have been assigned the task of writing software that can handle every country (and would like some indigestion), check out this exceptionally good guide to international mailing.

Example of content:

In MAURITIUS, the use of postcodes has been introduced on a trial basis in a single delivery office. This trial, limited for the moment to the Curepipe office (742CU001 CUREPIPE), has not yet been extended to other offices owing to numerous difficulties, such as the lack of street names, house numbers, etc.

Also, you can check out the USPS International Mail Manual.  More from this to follow.

I get tons of visits from USPS employees to my Postal Cancel Art pages.  That warms my heart.

It looks like my Postal Cancel Art page got written up in the Wikipedia under the entry for Cancellation.  The link text is “Some people attempt to use stamps relating to the theme of a pictorial cancellation on the envelope.”  Very cool.  Thanks, anonymous wiki contributor!

(Note added 07 May 2004: Oh, right, OK.  Now that I know more about how to use Wikipedia, I can see that it wasn’t an anonymous contributor, it was surrealist painter and mail artist Daniel C. Boyer who heads the The International Union of Mail-Artists.  Weird that I’m on their radar screen.  I’m going to have to learn more about the movement.)

Stamp collectors might be amused by this heartwarming story that showed up on Usenet.

Good question.  I’m guessing the latter, according to an online philately Q&A forum:

Q: Can you tell me when stamps first began to appear?

A: The first postage stamp was in Great Britain in 840 [sic].  The first U.S. postage stamp was in 1847.

My, were we behind the times!

From Canadian Stamp News:

Canadian investigators claimed their first big victory in the decade-old Nigerian Letter Scam [more detail] last summer after arresting three Toronto-area men charged with bilking foreigners out of millions of dollars.  The three-year joint task force investigation included the RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police], FBI, and United States Secret Service.

Most of the 300 victims are American, but others live in Great Britain and Germany, investigators said.  Victims forked out as little as $52,000 after falling for promises of riches from an illegal money-laundering deal while one coughed up $5 million (U.S.).

Ironically, if any potential victim had been a stamp collector, one look at the envelopes [presumably placed by hand into mailboxes] should have provided a ludicrously-easy clue to something being wrong with the contents.  Of the handful of RCMP-seized letters franked with so-called Nigerian stamps, most were obvious fakes, likely colour photocopies produced in Canada.  The worst-looking one was a copy of a recent 50-Niara commemorative entitled Rock Bridge that had misregistered overly-light colours and perforations that appeared to have been made with a blunted sewing machine needle.

Note: Apparently there is a new variant specifically targeting Mormons.  The African correspondent is reportedly a Mormon who has been persecuted because of his beliefs.  The president of the BBB in the targeted area of the U.S. warns Americans that this is as much of a fraud as the standard Nigerian scam.  She writes, “It is just as bogus, no matter how many times it mentions God, country and church affiliation.”  Actually, that is a useful sentence to remember in general.

It is hard to believe that it is after midnight now.  There just doesn’t seem to be enough time to do everything I want to do these days.  This is mostly a good thing: there are a lot of activities that interest me at the moment, so I am never at a loss for something to do and enjoy.  Here is a list of activities I have wanted to pursue in the past couple of days, only a subset of which have been accomplished or attempted.

1. Play with Cakewalk.  Use it to record some of my musical compositions, with multiple vocal and instrumental tracks.
2. Order more stamps from Iowa Stamps & Coins for my ongoing (but unnamed) philatelic art project.  Work on the art project.  Transfer the pieces to a new album.
3. Work on a redesign of mcgees.org.
4. Install the new printer that has been sitting on my floor, in a box, since the day after Christmas.
5. Play some more with the new TiVo.
6. Watch some of the movies recorded by it.
7. Listen to my new CDs from Christmas.
8. Research the sport of fencing.
9. Add advertising to ScotchFinder (the advertisers are arranged, I just need to do some re-coding of the site.)  Add the ability to search the database via a toll-free telephone number.
10. Research whale deafness.
11. Continue reading The Annotated Alice, Infinite Jest, and The Life of Samuel Johnson.
12. Research PocketPCs, potentially to buy one soon.
13. Make hotel reservations for the UK trip.
14. Search Fresh Air archives.
15. Buy add-ons to the hamster habitats.
16. Clean my study.
17. Reinstall Microsoft Visual Studio at home from my CDs, which I haven’t done since my hard drive crashed.

These are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head.  (You probably think some of these are fake, thrown in for humor.  That is not the case.  Even the whale one.)  Implicitly on the list, of course, is to write about the activities in this ‘blog.

My makeshift way of dealing with the situation has been to get 5.5 hours of sleep per night.  I think this is beginning to take a toll.  It’s getting close to 12:30.  I will probably go watch half an hour of “Antiques Roadshow” on TiVo, pour a malt, maybe scoop a bit of Ben and Jerry’s (which is, by the way, now the most popular tourist attraction in Vermont.  Yikes.)

More descriptions of the activities on the list will follow, as time permits.  I have found that it is frequently easier to write about one’s experiences doing something after one has already done the something.  Wish me luck for making the time.