Rodrigues Rarity

Rodrigues is an island in the Indian Ocean about 500 kilometres north-east of Mauritius. It was discovered in the early sixteenth century but not settled (by Europeans) for several centuries. By the late eighteenth century it was being used by French privateers to raid shipping cargos of the East India Company.

The British landed troops in 1809 and used it as a base to capture Mauritius in the following year and then became a dependency of that island. In 1861 a postal system was started and operated as a branch office of Mauritius. From that time until well into the twentieth century the number of Europeans living on the island fluctuated at around a dozen.

Mauritius stamps used on mail from Rodrigues can be identified by the numeral postmark "B65"; until a datestamp reading Rodrigues was introduced about 1900. These are much scarcer than the better known Mauritius used in the Seychelles postmarks.

Going through a Mauritius stock purchased some months ago I was fortunate to find a partial but identifiable postmark freom Rodrigues Island. So, we offer it on the blog first.



B65 used at Rodrigues - Mauritius #75 with small thin
(the B is not visible in the postmark) Price $75 (Item #6n26)



B64 used in the Seychelles - Mauritius #33 with a nearly invisible crease
Price $70 (Item #6n27)

Tomorrow I leave for Halifax to view, bid on, and hopefully be successful at a stamp auction in Halifax. I will write a report upon my return Monday - maybe (the following day is our Grand Opening and there will be many many many things to do at the last minute!)

New Purchases

One of the recently purchased lots we have been working on has many dozens of attractive plate number blocks and blocks of four of early British Commonwealth from Queen Victoria issues through the early issues of Vicky's great-great granddaughter Betty. There is lots of new material for customers to enjoy - and some of it not very expensive and found in our red boxes (for example inter-panneau blocks of inexpensive War Tax or Red Cross blocks).

Today Brian has put away into our red boxes over 1000 new items. Although we don't publicize the additions to our red box stock (and with about 200 red boxes, some receive new additions only occasionally) we really do keep adding to this inventory almost daily.



Some very nice Canada has been added. Among the still affordable items are two used back of the book items. Early use of the Registered stamps of Canada are very seldom found with clear dated cancels. We offer an example with fine only centering dated Feb. 25, 1876 (the stamp was issued on Nov.15, 1875) for $20. A block of stamps which I like is this one of J6. It has very fine centering and neat "socked-on-the-nose" cds cancels from Rock Island dated 1933. Our price $30. An interesting mint item is shown below. It is a three cent brown Admiral fresh, never hinged booklet pane (#108a) with a current Unitrade cv of $240 but it has been guillotined by the printer on a bias producing a rather odd looking pane. Our price $150.

Tarifold Turnover

Stamp dealers often use a display system known as a tarifold. Typically a stand holds 30 plastic pages in which 60 sheets or pages can be displayed back to back. Currently we have 14 of these and more in reserve when we have more counter space ("Real soon now," our contractor keeps saying).

In the past number of years these have grown in a somewhat indiscriminate manner. At first we put into the tarifold oversize items and items we felt were of a lower philatelic standard than our books, then we put more and more pretty topical stamps into the tarifolds. We then expanded a little into a tarifold devoted to Canadian souvenir sheets and the like which are popular with tourists.

Stamp dealers, on the whole, are not very smart retailers. And I'm a poster boy for being a dumb retailer. The tarifolds are very popular with the public generally and even the most advanced philatelist will usually flip through a few pages. If they are one of our best selling tools, why, why, and why have we not made better use of them?

Kate has started putting together nice pages of displays of our better Commonwealth stamps; she will continue with foreign and then Canadian. These pages show off our expensive stamps as photocopies. The first tarifold is finished and it certainly sends a message that we had not been sending before as people flipped the pages. It is going to take many weeks to finish but eventually our tarifolds will have a good representation of what is found in our stock. We will still have attractive topical sets but will also have a much better representation of everything we offer.

Beautiful Bremen

It occurs to me after typing in this title that I really have no idea whether Bremen is beautiful; however the stamps issued by Bremen are among the more interesting of the early German States. Yersterday we purchased a small group of 4 items.



First, and most importantly, is the 10 grote value of 1867 (Scott #14). It is a very fine stamp with a Friedl Certificate and Herbert Bloch has signed the stamp to indicate no faults or repairs. We offer this scarce item (Michel 1400 euros) for $995.



Secondly, we offer a very fine example of the 1867 two grote with large even margins (Scott #11 $225, Michel #10 320 euros) for $200.



Our third offering is a small piece with two creased stamps and one sound example. The high value of 5 silbergroschen is creased and alas is not green (CV of $3750) but yellow green with a CV of $175. One of the two grote stamps is badly creased and cracked, the other is sound. These latter two appear, especially when compared with the second offer above, to be the red orange shade (Scott 14a $500, Michel 10b 700 euros). Michel prices the 5 silbergroschen on cover at about seven times normal. I offer this as genuine (but "as is" with respect to the shade of the two grote) for a price of $250. If it remains unsold at the end of November it will be sent out for a Certificate and if the two grotes are Scott #11a the price will go up.



Our fourth offering is a stamp of Hannover but cancelled in the medieval "Free City" of Bremen prior to the issuance of Bremen stamps. The stamp is, in our opinion, a genuine #7a (Scott $775, Michel 6b 1200 euros) with large margins but faded colour and faults. The interesting aspect is the Bremen cancel in blue; my price is $75 for this item.

Auction Action

Yesterday we got a carton of stamps in from a wholesaler. We use these to make packages and often have to pay more than half the price of the finished package just for the stamps. Sometimes we are able to get a relative bargain. One of these was the purchase of 50 sets of 25 different Walt Disney stamps for only US$62.50 plus shipping. Obtaining quantities of Disney stamps for only 5 cents each is a low price. The stamps were in sheets of 25 so I decided to prepare these in 50 packets of 25 each for my packet-maker to display in our attractive packages. That took more than one and a half hours.

Today began with a determination to start reducing the wall of stamps we have in the vault. I tackled some of the more common or more time-consuming envelopes and packages. After more than an hour I was able to bring four cartons out to the front of the store. Two are nearly full of foreign stamps and priced to sell at $100 each. Another was of British Commonwealth at $250, and the fourth is Canada at $150. One of the sources was our old half-price "102" cards. I think we are finally sold out of these once we have these cartons sold.

Today brought a large carton of British Commonwealth from an auction house. I had bid on these without viewing and was quite disappointed because the auction description proved to be inaccurate. Now I have to either return the carton or see if the auction house is able to make a price adjustment. There are some auction houses which are intransigent with respect to returns or adjustments; while others do their best to make an accommodation if the complaint is justified.

In this case I believe that there will be an amiable settlement. But it teaches two lessons about auction houses -- if descriptions are inconsistent never bid without viewing (in the case of today's carton this auction house is usually very accurate) -- and make sure to deal with auction houses which want to keep your business.

I was on the other side in the auction business (1990-2001) and it is true there are a small minority of customers who are unreasonable -- fortunately most are understanding. Auction houses, on the whole, do their best to accurately describe the lots on offer. What I have learned from decades of viewing and attending auctions is that every auction house has individual idiosyncracies. This applies to descriptions as well as lotting techniques and everything else which goes into making an auction. What you can expect, given the same set of circumstances, is different treatment from one auction house to the other.

Complicated Cartouche

Yesterday I spent some time on a manila stockpage of fresh mint Saudi Arabia. Most were from the 1960s and 1970s with the airmail sets and the definitive issues showing the Wadi Hanifa Dam and the Gas-Oil Separating Plant. If one has only a few of these the many listings (about 200 in Scott) can be daunting. The airmails have two designs and only six sets, and I soon was able to easily distinguish between the cartouche of King Saud and that of King Faisal. It was not too long before the airmails were identified, then graded and priced; and it turned out that a few had a high catalogue value (the best was $140 - but quite a number were over $10 - and the task of identification always seems to be more fun when there are pleasant surprises like these).

Then I turned to the regular definitives. First the two cartouche types were separated, then I decided to sort by denomination. The difference in colours could be striking. And I started to get excited. One seemed to be #323 with a catalogue value of a whopping $325. But wait a minute, the stamp clearly has a watermark (one of the tests with the airmails was checking for watermarks).

It soon became clear that the Scott listing for the 1960 set is missing the very important information that this set is on paper with watermark 361. Alas my $325 stamp has a catalogue value of only $2.10 (Scott #237). Catalogue editors get it "right" more often than 99 percent of the time and so it is fun to catch an error like this. Anyway a good deal of nice quality Saudi Arabia is now added to our inventory and now I can recognize the cartouches of the two kings.



A small collection of Turkey came in with a general estate. This is about 125 stamps on album pages and predates the much larger Turkey collection recently bought by us. These pages contain at least 4 stamps with an unusual postmark in blue of a circle enclosing a wavy line and an arabic character. I don't recall seeing it before. Some expert will likely tell me that it is quite common. In any event we will show you a sample; if anyone has any information, we'd like to know. Alternately buy the whole collection for $75 before we find out.

Today our interior doors were installed and we show you an image of the doors from the outside.

New door, new thematics

Some days we get so busy doing the many things which are backlogged that important things like remembering to do the blog get passed by. Yesterday we started a massive re-organization of out topical or thematic books. We have added nearly thirty books and also more closely aligned the books on the shelves with the topics found on our website.

We are still in a situation where a search from our website will show only stamps in our inventory which are found in our country books. Visitors to the store will be pleasantly surprised with the additions which are not found on the website (yet). We still have tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of lovely topicals in our red boxes. If we moved all these to our new books we would not have space. We will eventually dedicate five shelves (150 books) to stamps organized by topic or theme.

Yesterday we also continued work on a very large collection purchased over the weekend. As days go by we will report on significant groups added to our inventory.

Today we keep hearing the cling-cling-cling of a small bell. Part of our alarm system is to hear this whenever the outer front door opens. Workmen are installing our new door (we'll have a scan fairly soon) and, as a result, the movement triggers the bell about 50 times more frequently than an average day.

Those of you who have been into the store know how cumbersome the old doors were and will welcome the change.

At the end of the month I will be travelling to Halifax to thoroughly view and then bid in the Eastern Auctions sale of the "Roberts" collection. I will be able to act as agent for collectors or dealers interested in placing bids at this sale.

Our Grand Opening will be December 5th

We have finally set a date for our Grand Opening! We will hold it on Tuesday December 5th. Now we have to really start preparing - especially getting the art gallery ready.

There was an attempted entry early this morning, possibly because the old front doors look easy to get into. Our landlord says to expect the new front door by Thursday. It will certainly make for a big improvement.

Our new backlit signs are being built today. That's another feature which will make a huge difference once they are up: the signs measure 46 inches wide by 52 inches high. They really are huge when you consider a box is being built which has to be tight enough not to leak light from the cracks, a light source has to be added, we need access to be able to change the signs, etc. Our projected date to have these ready is the middle of next week.

Pricing rollercoaster

Lighthouse Publications has announced two major price changes. The first one to cheer about is the Canada Album. This deluxe hingeless album has been retailing for more than $1200 for the three volume complete Canada. The price has been really slashed to $797 - a price which includes the 2005 supplement. We certainly hope that this dramatic price reduction holds for next year's supplements. We have lowered the prices of our instock albums to reflect this change.

The second price change is not for the better. All Lighthouse mounts have been increased in price by one dollar. We received advance notice of the change and we were able to stock up at the old price. We will not be raising the prices of our in-stock mounts, so while they last you can buy at the old price. New orders of inventory will in the future be priced at the new level.

Today I was busy with a good customer from the west coast. He found lots of delightful stamps and toward the end of nearly five hours in the store he decided to buy the best Seaway Invert of the three we could currently offer. In one of the co-incidences that sometimes happens, a few minutes later I received a phone call from a prominent dealer who wanted to talk about Seaways in part because he had just sold an Inverted Seaway.

Our library

Brian has spent much of the past week working on the library and reading room area. With a total of about 200 square feet and with shelving 7 feet in height, there are many hundreds of books, studies, journals, pamphlets, and auction catalogues and other philatelic literature.

This reading room is becoming closer to our concept of a reading room which might become a magnet for local collectors. We welcome collectors to spend as long as they wish sampling the impressive array of literature on our hobby. Some books will only be available for reference but most will be available for sale.

Over time we will try to list as many books as practical on our website and in eBay stores.

This coming weekend has a show in Montreal and I will be viewing and making an offer on the estate of a long-time customer. Watch for details on Monday.

A lesson for dealers

Today while going through recently purchased auctions lots, there was one which was quite instructive to dealers.

I bid on one lot after valuing it at $800 and was successful at $750. The quality and value are certainly OK and the price was fair.

After checking our books I realized that this lot added nothing to what we are currently offering our retail customers. When I placed the stamps into our back-up inventory it is apparent that for most values we already had more in back-up than were offered in this lot.

Buying this lot was a mistake because $825 (hammer plus 10 percent) of our capital will be tied up for years. Fortunately, there were many other lots from the auction which have new inventory to delight and tempt our customers.




Later in the day a pleasant surprise was this rather ordinary looking Newfoundland stamp. It is printed on thick carton -type paper. I have encountered this thick paper on other values of Newfoundland stamps but it is indeed rare. This variety is unlisted, although it is a scarcer perforation 13.5 x 13.8 which is listed but unpriced in the Newfoundland Specialized Catalogue (#158iii). Our price is $50. (Inv #6m83)