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Acquisitions...
Jan. 25th, 2010 01:55 pmGalina and I were out and about yesterday, driving around Kemah and talking about what it would take to live aboard a sailboat, when we ran across a moving sale that was being run by a couple of approximately our age as they prepared to sell off the last of their stuff and go live on a 35-foot sailboat.
I was a little light on cash, or I would probably have picked more than the two items that I did. One is a book of Robert Burns' Poems and Songs published as a complimentary giveaway for J & R Tennent Ltd. Wellpark Brewery in Glasgow, Scotland. What makes the book notable is its size, which is about 2/3 of a small Moleskine notebook. There is no publication date and I was not able to find any such animal on eBay, but the book is in excellent condition, with only an owner's name written in green fountain ink on the flyleaf.
The other item I picked up at the sale is a French-English dictionary of business and professional correspondence. I have to confess, French business language has always reminded me strongly of the rather stodgy, formal expressions one finds in old letters written in English ("I have the pleasure, sir, of remaining, etc.").
Then just now, I returned from the post box with a package of stamps I won in a recent eBay auction, from a fellow who appeared to have populated a bunch of stock cards with old stamps, willy-nilly but grouped by country, and then put them up for auction with very nearly identical one-line descriptions, e.g. "Old French stamps. Mixed quality." This kind of description is a clear warning that basically, what-you-see-is-what-you-get-and-less, because a group photo doesn't provide you with much information past the very obvious. Hinge marks, thins, torn perferations, and other possible defects just don't show up. Still, despite the caveat emptor nature of the sale, of the nearly dozen auctions I put bids on, I only won two.
So it was with a pair of very raised eyebrows that I took a close look at one small piece of the content on one card: a pair of stamps printed in 1920, the 2-franc denomination of the so-called "Merson" design. What puzzled me was that I could see no cancellation marks on the stamps (all of the other stamps on the card are well-and-truly cancelled, and for the price I paid, I expected them to be), which placed them in the "unused" category. When the gum on the back turned out to appear undisturbed, they became likely members of the "mint never-hinged" category.
I'll not brag about the catalog value of this "find" because my examination was at best cursory and stamp catalog values are not real, but I will say that if this pair is even worth 10% of catalog, the other stamps on the card - which, alas, I do not have time to look at too closely right now - came along for the ride for free. (If I were to add the stamps from the other card to the balance, it would be fair to conclude that I have come away with a good deal).
Ah, well... back to work!
Cheers...
I was a little light on cash, or I would probably have picked more than the two items that I did. One is a book of Robert Burns' Poems and Songs published as a complimentary giveaway for J & R Tennent Ltd. Wellpark Brewery in Glasgow, Scotland. What makes the book notable is its size, which is about 2/3 of a small Moleskine notebook. There is no publication date and I was not able to find any such animal on eBay, but the book is in excellent condition, with only an owner's name written in green fountain ink on the flyleaf.
The other item I picked up at the sale is a French-English dictionary of business and professional correspondence. I have to confess, French business language has always reminded me strongly of the rather stodgy, formal expressions one finds in old letters written in English ("I have the pleasure, sir, of remaining, etc.").
Then just now, I returned from the post box with a package of stamps I won in a recent eBay auction, from a fellow who appeared to have populated a bunch of stock cards with old stamps, willy-nilly but grouped by country, and then put them up for auction with very nearly identical one-line descriptions, e.g. "Old French stamps. Mixed quality." This kind of description is a clear warning that basically, what-you-see-is-what-you-get-and-less, because a group photo doesn't provide you with much information past the very obvious. Hinge marks, thins, torn perferations, and other possible defects just don't show up. Still, despite the caveat emptor nature of the sale, of the nearly dozen auctions I put bids on, I only won two.
So it was with a pair of very raised eyebrows that I took a close look at one small piece of the content on one card: a pair of stamps printed in 1920, the 2-franc denomination of the so-called "Merson" design. What puzzled me was that I could see no cancellation marks on the stamps (all of the other stamps on the card are well-and-truly cancelled, and for the price I paid, I expected them to be), which placed them in the "unused" category. When the gum on the back turned out to appear undisturbed, they became likely members of the "mint never-hinged" category.
I'll not brag about the catalog value of this "find" because my examination was at best cursory and stamp catalog values are not real, but I will say that if this pair is even worth 10% of catalog, the other stamps on the card - which, alas, I do not have time to look at too closely right now - came along for the ride for free. (If I were to add the stamps from the other card to the balance, it would be fair to conclude that I have come away with a good deal).
Ah, well... back to work!
Cheers...
