1898 Revenues: The Shift Hunter Letters

Monday, December 6, 2010

The Shift Hunter Letters

David Thompson did us a favor by looking for the double transfer in today's previous post in the The Shift Hunter Letters, to no avail. Dan Harding maintains a pdf version of this document on his website. In my earlier reviews of battleship related shift and double transfer material I did not include this reference. While most of the work in these "letters" involves first issue material, there is a fair amount of treatment of battleships at the back. Thanks to Dan for keeping this pdf up at his site and for Dave for checking it out for us.

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Unusual Ink on the 1898 Series Dollar Values

From fugitive ink to color changelings with unknown origins. These are both copies of R191. Can only exposure to light produce the color changes you see in stamp on the right? Or possibly a soak in bleach or other chemical? I doubt it. These stamps have so many examples of changelings that there must be something else happening. The ink used on this dark green series of stamps was different than that known on any other BEP printed stamps, never mind the varnish square. It is likely the BEP was experimenting with ink on this issue. Inks are discussed further if you click on the stamps.

Collecting Cancels

Welcome to 1898 Revenues, a website that features the stamps used to pay the Spanish-American war taxes imposed by the US Government starting in July, 1898. But while this site features those stamps in general, a focus is on their cancels, and on the firms that applied them. Unlike US postage stamps, which were canceled by the US Post Office and now Postal Service, revenue stamps were ordered to be canceled by their users in such a way that the identity of the user and the date was included in the cancel. This makes the collecting possibilities nearly endless, so that a single variety of stamp, for example, the 2 cent battleship stamp intended to pay documentary taxes, had potentially millions of different users, and therefore as many different cancels. Please browse the site and discover the collecting possibilities, made so much more accessible now through online sales. Cancels on these stamps have become much more interesting and accessible with the massive amounts of archival and historical data available on line. Rather than hours spent in libraries or with heavy volumes to identify cancels, search engines allow for cancel sleuthing at home.

Battleship Proprietary Printed Cancels: Updating the Joyce/Chappell Lists

In the 1950s, Morton Dean Joyce updated a list of printed cancels on the battleship proprietaries compiled by Clarence Chappell. Joyce's is a very long list consisting of more than one hundred companies and thousands of cancel dates. In the years since Joyce completed his list, many new cancel dates have been demonstrated to exist, and an update of the 1950s list is needed.

This site is attempting that update. Using the Joyce/Chappell lists and the former collection of Henry Tolman (ARA #25) as a base, a gradual effort will be made to post updated lists to the best of my knowledge, making a call for those that can contribute new dates and new images of those cancels.

Following in this column are quick links to excel files of these lists by company. Also are links to the posts that I have made on this blog regarding these companies and their cancels.

Criteria for Cancels Included in these Updated Lists

The updated lists on this site will not include handstamped cancels. Printed and typed cancels will be included. This differs from the Chappell and Joyce criteria for inclusion.

Joyce used criteria for including cancels in his lists based on Chappell's original criteria. From the introduction of Chappell's original list: "Only the printed and typed cancels will be given consideration in this list. The only exception being those firms who also had private die stamps in this period. The handstamps of these few companies are of general interest and I feel they should be included." I don't think the "general interest" consideration is a strong enough reason to complicate an already complicated set of lists. The handstamps listed by Chappell and Joyce are not printed by definition, they are likely not exhaustive, and by virtue of being handstamps are prone to innumerable types and subtypes. I reason that if a new list is of printed cancels, we should keep it that way, and let others that have have done more work on the subject of proprietary handstamps handle those cancels.

Thus, if you are interested in the handstamp cancels of any of the firms in the updated printed cancel lists, please refer to the excellent work of Robert Mustacich and his Battleship Desk Reference at http://www.battleship-revenues.com/.

The practice of eliminating handstamp cancels from the updated lists will have implications for the revision of cancel types from the Joyce lists. For example, the first few Antikamnia cancel types according to both Joyce and Chappell are handcancels. These cancels will no longer be included as cancel types.

The goal will be to minimize confusion for those who come to collect these cancels and make sense out of them.

Monday, December 6, 2010

The Shift Hunter Letters

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