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High Value Official Stamps on Cover |
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Alan Campbell |
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Chronicle, Vol. 52, No. 4, November, 2000 |
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Introduction |
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To make a quick judgment of how seriously an exhibit of classic United States stamps and postal history should be taken, simply station yourself in front of the last frame and count how many covers of the highest value are on display. With a very few exceptions - 30¢ 1867 A grill, 90¢ 1867 F grill (one cover known), 90¢ 1869 (only cover stolen), 90¢ 1870 grill - all of the 24¢, 30¢, and 90¢ values do exist on cover and generally in sufficient quantities that judges can fairly expect them to be shown. Now in the past decade, there has been a renaissance in competitive exhibits of the official stamps of 1873-1884, with at least six collectors (Rollin C. Huggins, Jr., Matthew Kewriga, Lester C. Lanphear III, Theodore Lockyear, Robert L. Markovits, and myself) showing at the national level. In jury critiques, should one of us inquire as to how our exhibit might be improved, the standard brusque refrain has been, "show more high values on cover." So we trudge out of the room muttering to ourselves, "Well, thank you very much, but that's easier said than done." In self-defense, then, this article will carefully document how scarce high value official stamps are on cover, by listing all those recorded with a 24¢ value or higher. Of course, within the small fraternity of official specialists, it is well known that virtually any 7¢, 10¢, 12¢ or 15¢ departmental stamp is also difficult to locate on cover. This article, though, will focus only the highest values, so as to catch some of the reflected glamour and prestige which has traditionally emanated from the same values of the regular issues. A preeminent cover will be illustrated from each department with the exception of Post Office, where neither of the 30¢ covers in the Ackerman sale of 1933 has resurfaced since. |
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The 24¢, 30¢, and 90¢ regular issue stamps were prepared to pay specific high pre-GPU international rates, and for the most part, this is how they were used and how they survive on cover. Domestic usages, typically on parcel wrappers and extra-size legal courthouse covers, are rarer, but their awkward size and dog-eared battered appearance generally make them unpresentable. Regrettably, this is precisely the format in which most high value official stamps are to be found on cover. They were put into service on July 1, 1873, only two years to the day before the 5¢ GPU rate went into effect. Moreover, none of the departments posted any significant amount of foreign mail. The only important surviving correspondences of official covers going overseas are the Conant to London (from Secretary of the Treasury John Sherman) and the Bingham to Japan. In as much as neither includes a single official stamp above the 15¢ on cover, they pale in comparison to such legendary correspondences as the Payan to France, the Heard to China, the Davis to Peru, or the Reverend Bissell to India. Pre-GPU or non-UPU treaty rate covers, besides the beauty of their colorful foreign transit markings, are preferred by collectors for the mundane reason that they can be mounted properly on a standard 8 1/2" x 11" page. Legal size covers are an exhibitor's nightmare, but their prevalence among official covers has forced most of us to go to oversize pages, (although there is one stubborn holdout whose exhibit can be identified instantly from across the room by the predominant slashing diagonals). Of the forty-two covers in my inventory, only three are of small size and of these three, only one is to a foreign destination. |
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In Figure 1, courtesy of auctioneer Matthew Bennett, Inc., we illustrate a remarkable stamped envelope (3¢ green on amber entire - U161) from a New York manufacturer of surgical instruments, with an advertising corner card illustrating medals awarded by the U. S. Centennial Commission in 1876. This cover, originally postmarked on April 2 (1878), is addressed to George C. Cooper, an apothecary on the U. S. S. Essex at Norfolk, Virginia. Because this vessel had already left port, the cover was forwarded from Norfolk to the Navy Department in Washington, D. C. There it was determined that the ship had sailed for Montevideo, Uruguay, so a 24¢ Navy stamp was added to make up the 27¢ British mail rate via England. The Navy stamp, placed over the Norfolk postmark, was canceled at the main Washington, D. C. post office with the distinctive violet ink (faded here to a dull red) used throughout 1878. The cover then made its way via New York (April 13) and London (April 28) and per the backstamp, arrived in Montevideo on May 22. But George Cooper was no longer attached to the ship. Per a note on the reverse, probably entered by an officer on board, he had been discharged from the U. S. S. Essex on July 17, 1877, and was thought to be living in Wakefield, Massachusetts. The cover was then forwarded back to the United States, although there are no transit marks for the reverse routing. The Wakefield, Mass. address proved to be a dead end, and the letter was sent on to the Dead Letter Office in Washington, D. C. (July 19), which returned it to the original sender on July 23. This is the most spectacular of a small group of fascinating usages, where the Navy Department supplied supplemental forwarding postage for mail addressed to their personnel at sea. In a previous article we illustrated a similar usage, also forwarded from Norfolk in 1878, which caught up with a Navy captain in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. But like the cover illustrated here, several other examples exist which went on frantic and ultimately fruitless quests to catch up with the addressee. |
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The survival rate for official stamps on cover is far lower than regular issues, because the bulk of this mail went between government offices: either the clerks skinned the stamps off to save for collectors, or the envelopes were lost when the files were later purged. Moreover, high value official stamps were mostly used on heavy mailings, where the survival rate is low, as opposed to being used on foreign mail like the regular issues, where the survival rate is relatively high. So for high value official stamps on cover, these two factors together will reduce the survival rate exponentially and compound the acquisition degree of difficulty. From the tables in Luff, we calculate that for the thirty-one different official high value parcel labels on package wrappers. In the specialized market for official postal history, such items are priced and sold as if they were intact covers. In Figure 2, courtesy of Robert L. Markovits, we illustrate the famous piece that was described in the 1933 auction catalog of Congressman Ackerman's collection as "the Kohinoor of the Department covers." I have discussed this cover previously, and would like to mention here only that this is a large mailing label on part of the front of the wrapping for a bundle of books. This of course is the unique piece on which the specialized catalogue listing for the $2 State on cover is based. The catalogue listing for the 90¢ State on cover is also based on two nearly identical cover fronts to Matamoros, Mexico. Surely everyone would agree that this is a sensible approach, to stand in awe that such pieces could have survived and acknowledge them as fully legitimate "covers", instead of quibbling over whether the back of the wrapping survives intact. After years of disputation, the issue was finally resolved (or gracefully finessed) in the 2001 edition of the catalogue, with the creation of a new listing category: "on parcel label". In Figure 3, courtesy of Lester C. Lanphear III, we illustrate a 24¢ Agriculture stamp tied to a parcel label posted in Washington, D. C. addressed to Wyoming, Pennsylvania (PFC #0189853, issued 6/7/88). A 3¢ Agriculture cover from the same correspondence was illustrated here previously. Mr. Lanphear's label, although roughly trimmed, still adheres to the parcel wrapping (as if that should make any difference), and represents the only known usage of the 15¢, 24¢, or 30¢ Agriculture stamps. |
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Of the forty-two legitimate covers found, I know the whereabouts of twenty-six. Nine high value official covers were lost when the Charles J. Starnes collection was stolen in 1983. Even though I have severe reservations as to whether they still exist, I have included them in this census because most have a famous provenance. Collectors who scour the auction catalogues of the great official cover collections of earlier generations are entitled to know what measure of hope to hold out that long-missing covers will resurface. Seven other high value official covers could not be accounted for. Of these seven, five were last seen in the Ackerman Sale of 1933, one at a John Fox Auction in 1955, and one in the "Crystal" Sale of the Ehrenberg collection in 1981. The Ackerman catalogue was not illustrated, and the cover unaccounted for from the Ehrenberg sale was not pictured. Since our research into official covers has improved greatly in the intervening years, it is possible that a few of these missing covers might not now be deemed legitimate. This was the case for a 24¢ State refolded cover, ex-Ackerman, sold in the Ehrenberg Sale as Lot 359, which did not subsequently stand up to expertization. Reservations have been expressed about other high value covers, especially when the stamp is not tied. |
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Official covers in general are not easy to fake, simply because the starting point is usually a period official business envelope with an imprinted corner card. It would simply be too expensive to reproduce one from whole cloth. Mr. Markovits' fascinating one frame exhibit of "Unofficials" does contain a couple of fake covers that were made up by utilizing some unused proof specimens of official envelopes. The style of these envelopes was a giveaway, since it did not match that of any known to have been used by the departments, although the faker also committed the unpardonable blunder of affixing perforated proofs instead of real stamps! In a few cases, forgers have replaced the original stamps on regular issue covers and added fake handstamped corner cards and fake postmarks, but these are usually easily detectable. Unused prestamped reply envelopes from a number of departments also exist, and fake postmarks and killers have been added to a few of them, most notably on Agriculture covers (the John Hagen collection, sold by Dennis J. Swinehart in the early 1980's, contained two of these). The best raw material for faking official covers are the official imprinted envelopes that were sometimes posted with regular issue stamps. Then the faker's challenge will be to remove the Banknote regular issue stamps, substitute unused official stamps, and somehow get the tying postmark or killer to match up. High value official covers, though, pose a unique danger, in that if a lower value official stamp can be found on a legal cover not tied but with a socked-on-the-nose killer, it can be lifted and replaced with a higher value official stamp. For this reason, collectors are cautioned to be circumspect about high value official covers when none of stamps are tied. |
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Of the forty-two covers found, nine were to foreign destinations: Brazil, Canada, Germany, Japan (2), Mexico (2) and Uruguay (2). But three of these were in the stolen Starnes collection, leaving only six for collectors today. In Figure 4, courtesy of Dr. David H. Lobdell, we illustrate a War cover to Japan franked with a pair of 24¢ War stamps, opened up to show the markings on the back. Also owned by Dr. Lobdell is a 6¢, 30¢ War cover from the same correspondence. The stamps on this second cover were mistakenly identified in both the Hughes and Duckworth catalogs as being the soft paper issue, but the 1876 docketing renders this impossible. I will excerpt here some comments prepared by Dr. Lobdell about this spectacular pair of covers, which rival the Commander Caldwell covers - a 24¢ Navy to Uruguay and a 12¢, 30¢ Navy to Brazil - owned by Charles Starnes (since 1983, in philatelic limbo and sinking fast). |
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"Both covers were sent by the War Department's Chief Signal Officer to 'Benjamin Smith Lyman, Chief Geologist and Mining Engineer to the Kaitakushi'. Lyman was a Harvard graduate who later studied at the Ecole de Mines in Paris and set himself up as a consulting geologist. Between 1873 and 1879 he was chief geologist to the Japanese government, principally working for the Kaitushi, which was an agency with the responsibility for the colonization and development of the natural resources of the northern island of Hokkaido. (Hokkaido was Japan's version of our frontier in '70s, so that while we were sending homesteaders into our West and killing off the Indians, they were populating Hokkaido with ethnic Japanese and doing a number on the native hairy Ainu.)" |
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"The pair of 24¢ War stamps pays four times the treaty rate of 12¢ per half ounce for mail from the United States to Japan. (Although the General Postal Union rate of 5¢ per half ounce for international mail was already in force for many countries, Japan did not sign the GPU until the following year.) The letter was mailed in Washington, D. C. on May 9 and reached Yokohama on June 29, 1876, where a red "Yokohama Paid All" was applied by the US postal station there. It then took nine more days to travel less than twenty-five miles to Mr. Lyman at his lodgings in Yedo (the old name for Tokyo). How did it get from the US to Japan? There were two possible routes: (1) via New York to London, where it would have been put on a British ship round the Cape of Good Hope to the Orient, or (2) via the recently-completed transcontinental railroad to San Francisco, where it would have been put on an American ship to Yokohama. Since the envelope lacks New York and London transit markings, I favor the Trans-Pacific route." |
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Both covers were at one time in the collection of Congressman Ackerman, the leading collector of United States official covers in the early part of this century. When Ackerman's collection was auctioned in 1933, at the very nadir of the Great Depression, the 24¢ cover fetched $20 and the 30¢ cover $12 - and at that, they brought more than any of the other fifty War Department covers in the auction. Let's hope that none of us have to sell our stamps during a Depression!" |
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Of the domestic usages, perhaps the most spectacular cover surfaced in November, 1998 in a Matthew Bennett, Inc. auction. Nathan Goff served as the U. S. Attorney in Clarksburg, West Virginia from 1868 to 1881, and over half the surviving Justice covers derive from mailings sent from Washington, D. C. to him or to the clerk of the U. S. District court there, John Moore. In the Bennett sale, a large portion of the Goff/Moore correspondence never previously seen was consigned by an old-time Baltimore stamp dealer. "In the early 1970's, the consignor traveled to Philadelphia for the purpose of negotiating a sale of the Goff covers with legendary dealer Philip Ward. Upon seeing the high value Justice Department covers offered to him, his eyes popped and he was at a momentary loss of words." For Justice covers, we official collectors would be dead in the water without the Goff correspondence, and from the collector's point of view, it is a crying shame that groups of covers such as this weren't liberated from government archives more often. Which gives us pause to wonder, could a find comparable to the Goff correspondence still be moldering away in the basement of a courthouse somewhere? In Figure 5, courtesy of Theodore Lockyear, we illustrate a breathtaking legal cover franked with three 90¢ and four 30¢ Justice stamps. Since the envelope could hardly have contained four pounds of paperwork, we theorize that it was used as a mailing front on a tied bundle of courthouse documents, with the pressure from the string biting a notch into the top of the cover. |
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With the addition of this cover to his exhibit, Mr. Lockyear was finally able to show all values of the Department of Justice on both hard and soft paper on cover. It is not possible to accomplish this feat in any other department with the exception of the short Executive set, which Mr. Lanphear completed with the purchase of the unique 10¢ cover. Dr. Lobdell has completed the War Department except for the 30¢ value on soft paper (not known to exist), and Robert Markovits has completed the Department of State through the $2. |
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Another official envelope that appears to have been used as a mailing front is illustrated in Figure 6, courtesy of Lester C. Lanphear III. This is a legal size penalty envelope from the Land Office at Larned, Kansas addressed to a private citizen in Lyons, Kansas. Notes on the back and glue residue suggest that this envelope was pasted to a larger one containing homestead proofs. The 90¢ Interior stamp pays the 10¢ registry fee and postage at regular first class domestic rates, since at this time the penalty clause was not valid for field office correspondence with private citizens. This is the only legitimate 90¢ Interior cover recorded (PFC #0232519, issued 12/28/90), and is one of only two solo usages of 90¢ official stamps, the other being Dr. Lobdell's 90¢ War cover. |
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In Figure 7, courtesy of Matthew Bennett, Inc., we illustrate an unusual four value Treasury franking paying sixteen times the domestic first class rate. This large envelope, with the hand-written corner card of the Superintendent of Construction for the Post Office and Sub (sic) Treasury Building at Boston, was mailed to Farmington Falls, Maine. Even though it suffers from an advanced case of smallpox, this cover will attract spiriting bidding in an upcoming auction, since no major collection of official covers since Ackerman has contained a 30¢ Treasury cover. 456,000 30¢ Treasury stamps were requisitioned in the fiscal years 1874-1879, the stamp used catalogues a humble $9.00, and yet this may well be the only cover to have survived. |
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Counting the four stamps issued on soft paper, the catalogue lists 31 different high value official stamps, 24¢ denomination and above. Thirteen of these have never been reported on cover, not counting the 30¢ Navy stamp, of which the only reported cover (ex-Starnes) was stolen and is presumed lost to philately. Of the seventeen other high value official stamps which can be found on cover, only three have at least four examples reported: O22 24¢ Interior - 6, O66 30¢ State - 7, and O92 30¢ War - 4. The other fourteen high value official stamps survive on cover in quantities ranging from one to three. By comparison, the 1860 90¢ regular issue (#39) is very rare on cover and catalogues $225,000 in the 2000 edition of the Scott Specialized Catalogue of U. S. Stamps and Covers. Six examples of this stamp on cover are known. Since I would prefer to continue collecting in this field, I would not begin to argue that high value official covers deserve to be valued in this same range. Still, when our exhibits are judged, heavy bonus points in the "difficulty of acquisition" category should be credited whenever we manage to show even a few of these extremely rare covers. Cost not withstanding, there are simply not enough of them to go around. |
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In the 2001 edition of the Scott Specialized Catalogue of U. S. Stamps and Covers, the 24¢ Agriculture parcel label was finally listed, and the entry for the $2 State was changed from " on cover" to "on parcel label". From the research presented here, I would recommend a few further changes. The price of $500.00 for a 24¢ Interior cover seems absurdly low and should be stricken. A new price should be entered for the 24¢ Navy on cover, based on the realization in the upcoming Bennett sale. The listing for the 24¢ State on cover should be unpriced, since the basis for the current price is an auction realization for a cover that received a bad certificate. A new price should be entered for the 30¢ Treasury on cover, again based on the realization in the Bennett sale. |
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In conducting this census, I relied on photocopies of the current major collections, on auction catalogues of the Steinmetz, Ackerman, Knapp, Hughes, Duckworth, Ehrenberg and Stone sales, on marginally legible bootleg third generation photocopies of the Starnes collection, and notes made on a few other auction lots. I counted full covers, cover fronts, and parcel labels, but did not include stamps on piece. As a control to measure the completeness of this survey, I was able to compare it with the ongoing census of rare official covers started by Charles Starnes and maintained by my assistant section editor, Lester C. Lanphear III. I am indebted to Robert L. Markovits, who reviewed an early draft of this article; to Mr. Lanphear, who made many valuable suggestions; to Dr. David H. Lobdell, for supplying the eloquent analysis of his 24¢ War cover; to Mr. Theodore Lockyear, for the opportunity to reproduce here his spectacular Justice cover; and to Harvey Bennett and George Eveleth, for furnishing photocopies of the important covers from the upcoming Matthew Bennett, Inc. auction. I am eager to hear from any collector who either currently owns one of the high value covers listed here but unaccounted for, or who can report a new discovery. |
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Afterword by Assistant Section Editor Lester C. Lanphear III: |
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On one of my visits to Charles Starnes he told me, "The one regret I have is never owning a 90¢ departmental cover". Since his entire collection was stolen in 1983 and not a single piece has been recovered, I suppose those of us collecting today should considerate it fortunate that he was never able to buy a 90¢ cover. |
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In reviewing the sales catalogues of great official cover collections of the past as well as the current collections, an interesting fact stands out: the maximum number of different 90¢ values on cover any collector has owned is two. The short list of collectors who have been able to accomplish this feat: Ackerman, Lanphear, Markovits, and Waud. |
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e-mail: alan campbell |
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copyright © 2000-04 fran adams |
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