Thinking of Becoming a Stamp Dealer?

Well, it can be fun .... But here are three things to think about:

1.
You are probably thinking about a one-person business. Now, a one-person business can only be as good as the one person. If you are well-organised as a person, it will show in your business. If you are lazy, the same. If you are mean, the same. Etc. Usw.

2.
If you choose to stock just a few expensive items, then it will be easy to see if you are making a profit and what kind of profit. It will be quite easy to keep records. But most dealers end up with stocks bigger than the stock of the local IKEA. It's very hard to keep a record - it could take 100% of your time. It's very hard to know what profit, if any, you are making when you sell one item on the Internet or at a Stamp Fair. At best, you can have a general idea. So maybe you bought 1000 items for 1000 euros. So you know that if you are selling each one at more than 1 euro you are doing something right - if you sell them all. But if you sell one item for 100, you know that means that you can afford to sell some other items for 50 cents. The only method I have is this: when I buy 1000 items I try to put a price on them all before I even sell one. That way I at least know what Total value I have placed on them. Maybe if I was starting again I would use bar - coding and store everything in a data base. But I still think that maintaining the data base could be a full-time job. You will neglect the important things: studying what you have in your stock, picking out forgeries, picking out damaged things,noticing good things, doing a bit of research when you get something you have not seen before.


3.
Trust. If you don't trust other people, it's difficult to be a stamp dealer. I don't have a problem trusting other people and it saves me a great deal of time. Here is a short list of things I don't do: I never make photocopies of things I send out on approval or of things in my boxes, I never use "Premium" postage or shipping services, I don't insure my stock. Sometimes I say to a client "Go through them" - maybe it's a bag with 1000 stamps in it - "pick out what you want and then we can agree a price". And I have no idea what is in the bag. Oh, and another thing: I usually say, Pay me when you get the stamps I am sending you today. That way, when I get a cheque or a bank transfer I know that the transaction is finished. (Among themselves, dealers constantly rely on trust).

Of course, sometimes I lose things this way. But it's rare, actually very rare. And I save so much time. If you asked me why I think my business is profitable, I have to say: well, partly because I trust other people. Having clients you trust is a very big business asset. It makes life so much simpler.

The Crown Jewel of Western Ukraine Philately?

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The famous stamp shown above was unsold in the Christoph Gaertner Rarities auction in New York on 30 May 2016. It's described in the catalogue as the "crown jewel of Western Ukrainian philately" - and I used the same words when I wrote the descriptions for the Ron Zelonka sale at Corinphila Zurich in 2011. There the stamp was started at 30 000 CHF and sold for 44 000, which meant a final bill to the buyer of 52 800. So the Gaertner start price looks as if the 2011 buyer was prepared to sell with a chance of doing no better than getting their money back.

Personally, I think it's an over-rated stamp. The stamp issues of the Western Ukraine National Republic in 1919 all had strong philatelic motivations and little genuine postal use. This combination of stamp and overprint, in an edition of two, was entirely speculative - it was made so that someone or some group could benefit in some way. It must have added significantly to the value of the Ekonomat document to which it was originally affixed, even before its "Crown Jewel" status was given to it..

In contrast, scarce and rare non-philatelic mail used in the Republic during 1919 is bought and sold for only a fraction of the price expected for this stamp. For example, in the Zelonka sale I described a lot of 37 mostly non-philatelic covers as a "valuable lot" and attached a start price of 3 500 CHF  - 100 CHF per cover. It sold for 11 000 hammer, but that still works out at only 400 CHF per cover. But if you started out today to accumulate 37 non-philatelic covers from 1919 Western Ukraine, not in the Zelonka lot, you would I think be lucky to achieve your goal. True, most of the covers in the 11 000 lot were franked with unoverprinted Austrian adhesives - but that is what you would expect. The overprinted stamps were made principally for dealers in Vienna, not for local mail. The exceptions are the Registration and CMT stamps of Kolomya and that for the rather strange reason that the philatelist involved in the issue, Cerniavski, liked to collect ordinary commercial mail - at the time, a fairly eccentric choice. Since he worked in the local court in Kolomya, he simply collected the envelopes coming into the court from all over the district of Kolomya / Pokutia - and very interesting envelopes they were!

Added February 2020: Most of my Ukraine-related Blog posts are now available in full colour book form. To find out more follow the link:

http://www.armeniazemstvo.com/2020/02/just-published-trevor-pateman.html

Kharbin in the Russo-Japanese War 1904 - 1906

Kharbin in Manchuria was the largest Russian military rear base during and immediately after the Russo-Japanese War, with warehouses holding supplies of food and weapons, barracks housing soldiers, and hospitals for the wounded and dying. A Hospital Suburb  [Gospital'ny Gorodok] was created in 1904 and by July of that year there were 12 Army hospitals and two Red Cross facilities. By January 1905, the number of hospitals had grown to 84 with a capacity to hold 30 000 patients. I take these figures from David Wolff's To The Harbin Station.

In the context of such numbers, it is not surprising that a post office was opened in the Hospital Quarter just as one was in the Barracks or Camp Quarter [ Korpus'ny Gorodok ]. In 1959, Tchilingirian and Stephen in Stamps of the Russian Empire Used Abroad, Part Five recorded a cancellation from the Camp on the basis of a single example. But they did not record a cancel for the Hospital Quarter. I show an example below; the cancellation is identical in style to the Camp Quarter cancel and reads KHARBIN GOSPIT. GORODOK serial "b". The card is an Imperial Formular card, pre-addresed in hectography to the Maria Feodorovna charities in St Petersburg.

What is puzzling is why this cancellation and the Camp cancellation should - apparently - be so rare. There were a very large number of people in Kharbin who would have wanted to write home at this time. Perhaps cards like this one are buried in dealer boxes, but after a hundred years that seems a bit unlikely - I did not find this  in a dealer box and paid a three figure sum for it But maybe readers do have other examples of this cancel and the Camp cancel. I will happily show them here if sent scans.

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POSTSCRIPT 7 June 2016

At the same time as I was writing the above piece, I was looking out Theatre Tax stamps from my stock. It occurs to me that I may have the answer to an old problem.

There exists a Kharbin Theatre Tax stamp which is rarely seen .I show it below. I first saw an example maybe twenty years ago when I bought parts of Agathon Faberge's fiscal collection. I have seen two or three since and have the example below in stock. Now, the printing, the burelage, the paper and the gum looks like those I would associate with the State Printing Works in St Petersburg; it does not look like a local production. The 2 kopeck value seems too low for a World War One or Civil War period production. The obvious conclusion is that this stamp was issued at the time of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904 - 06 in response to the vast influx of troops and other personnel to Kharbin, some of whom would have sought out theatres or concert halls for entertainment. In effect, Kharbin was a boom town at this time. Though the inscription on the stamp refers only to charitable purposes, the style in two halves with repeated text is that of a Theatre Tax stamp, designed for tearing in half.

Can any reader offer any confirmation or alternative suggestion?

12 June: YES is the answer to that - and I am wrong.Jack Moyes tells me in conversation that this stamp is a Theatre Tax stamp ( he tells me that he has in the past owned theatre ticket stubs) but that it is a First World War (Imperial period) stamp. We discussed why the theatres weren't using Maria Feodorovna Theatre Tax stamps and came to this conclusion: Kharbin was not part of Imperial Russia! It is for this reason that the stamps could be issued by the local government of Kharbin

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Imperial Russia, Private PERFINS on stamps

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Today I was sorting through an accumulation of a thousand old and mainly common stamps of Russian Levant. I was very surprised to come across one (just one) Perfin as shown above with a normal stamp of the same type beside it. All private Perfins on Imperial Russian stamps are scarce - they were not authorised until 1907 - and any Perfin on a proper commercial cover must be reckoned rare - when did you last see one in auction? 

For Russian Post Offices in China and Levant, perfined stamps are very scarce: the Levant post offices closed in 1914 so there is only a seven year period in which Perfins are possible there.  For the Levant post offices, Perfins of Credit Lyonnais ("C.L.") and the Imperial Ottoman Bank ("B.I.O.") are the only ones likely to be seen and then only on loose stamps.

There is a very good introduction to private Perfins by Dick Scheper and it is on line at

http://www.arge-russland.de/1850615.htm

The Perfin above is mentioned in a 1975 article by V. Maxa in the Bulletin of the Perfins Club. He regards it not as a Roman "R" but as a Cyrllic "Ya". Either way, he is not able to tell us the name of the organisation which used it. Can any of my readers assist? Even a guess would be helpful!

Added 4 August 2016: Dick Scheper i the Netherelands and an expert on Russian Perfins, writes this to me:

I have found this perfin only in Russian Levant stamps from Constantinople, not in Levant stamps of other countries.

In my opinion this perfin was used by the R.O.P.i.T., the Russian organization for steamshipping and trade, which had postal rights in the Levant and Black Sea area. The company had an office in the port of Constantinople.

Approvals, Bundleware, Packets - Salvaging from the Past of Stamp Collecting

I am a sucker for Old Hoards - what in Germany is described in auction catalogues as "Uralt Bestand". From time to time I buy them, the bigger the better, and then try to think of a way to re-organise them which does not have me spending weeks breaking Minimum Wage legislation (as Leon Finik recently put it in an article arising from sorting old bundleware).

This last week I bought a couple of thousand old envelopes which housed the basically pre-1939 Latin America stock of a London dealer, Oswald Marsh, who had incorporated into his own stock the earlier stock of another London firm, Errington and Martin.

It made me think about how stamps were assembled in the past (and to some degree, still are).

First, someone had to find an office, preferably one receiving a large volume of mail, willing to sell its incoming envelopes or, at least, to allow the stamps to be removed from them.

Then, the stamps had to be removed. In order to economise on weight, stamps were often cut very close thus damaging perforations or they were even peeled off which created other kinds of damage. So very early on the stamps which collectors wanted were damaged.

Next - as part of the service - the stamps had to be washed off paper. It is important to realise that for maybe a century this was done on an industrial scale, with billions of stamps being soaked off paper to supply dealers. At this stage, if the stamps were stuck onto any kind of coloured envelope or wrapper, then they would emerge from washing discoloured from that paper. More damage. If the washing was well-done, then the stamp backs would be clean but sometimes some gum would remain.

To me the most mind-numbing procedure comes next: the packaging of washed stamps into bundles of 100 of the same type, the bundles held together with a paper banderole or cotton thread. Imagine spending your working day doing that! If the stamps had been properly washed and dried, then bundling would not cause any difficulty when the time came to unbundle them. But the business of shuffling the stamps into a neat bundle would sometimes damage perforations as would the cotton thread.

Billions of stamps ended up in bundleware, some of them scarce stamps. Not so long ago, when I bought the Schmidt collection of Ukraine I was surprised to find used Trident overprinted stamps in bundles - made in the 1920s or 1930s and never unbundled. That implies access to considerable quantities of mail.

Eventually, a dealer would unbundle stamps and put them into retail packets or hinge them and put them into approval books (Auswahlheften, Carnets a Choix ) and after that what happened would depend on what the collector did with them. Errington and Martin kept their stock in envelopes with detailed stock control notes.

My most recent purchase includes clean stamps from bundleware and also multiply hinged stamps recycled from even more ancient collections. I am looking at how to encourage someone to salvage and recycle the material I now hold. Here, for example, is a page I have created with Brazilian stamps of the 1880s. You can see damage everywhere and you would see more if I turned over the stamps. The first thing these stamps need is a wash. But some have faded and only with difficulty can their catalogue status sub-types be distinguished. The only obvious things here which might interest a collector are the postmarks, clear against the pale backgrounds. With thousands of stamps from the same issue, you could hope to establish early and late dates of use, places of use and so on. Alternatively, you could pick out the better items from this page - row 2, position 5, for example, has no faults and looks good - and throw away the rest

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Dr Raymond Casey

Readers of this Blog may wish to know that Dr Raymond Casey died earlier this week, aged 98. He was famous for his remarkable collections of Russian Post Offices Abroad and Russian Imperial Ship Mail. He was still adding to the latter collection as recently as this month.

I feel sorry for collectors in Italy...

One of the nice things about collecting is that you can decide to collect anything you like and you alone make up the rules which say what is inside and outside your collecting field. But I am afraid I do expect collectors - and dealers - to understand something about collectible objects.

Those objects start their histories outside of our collections and when they arrive in our collections, one of our responsibilities is to conserve them in the best state we can, so that they endure and can pass on to others. In this, our collection - however modest - is like a museum collection. It is a small part of a heritage - sometimes our own, sometimes somebody else's - and we should look after it.

This is better understood now in stamp collecting and postal history than it once was. Most collectors no longer put hinges on anything, stamps or postal history items, and they no longer write on them as if they were scrap paper. Dealers still scribble prices on covers and cards and they need to be told not to. Some damage - however minor - is always caused when those prices are rubbed out by a collector or the next dealer along.

Because these things have only been understood in the recent past, we inherit a great deal of vandalised material. Different philatelic cultures have different traditions, some worse than others. Italy is home to one of the worst philatelic cultures from the point of view of understanding and valuing the collectible object and I feel sorry for collectors there who have to live with the legacy of their past.

I still get sent Italian auction catalogues but I rarely look at them - it is so depressing - and I don't bid. Today I glanced at a new Bolaffi catalogue which arrived in the post and my eye was caught by a Romanian cover:

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Well, there is a very beautiful 54 Parale Bull's Head - just look at the margins! But then look at the cover. Autographs and handstamps and annotations all over it. Just count them up! Worse, they have changed since the photograph was taken which appears in Dr Heimbuechler's Bull's Heads of Moldavia:

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Compare them carefully: some new graffiti have appeared and some old ones have been removed. The latter is a warning: where the old graffiti have been removed, there will be surface damage to the letter.

The letter is estimated at 7500 euro. I am always on the look out for Bull's Heads but I won't be bidding. There is too  much unattractive damage here to what was once - a very long time ago - a very desirable collectible object. Unfortunately, it fell into the hands of people who I don't think understood that.