About two months ago now I bought a three stockbook lot of used Small Queens. The lot consisted of a stockbook each of the half cent, 1c and 3c. I had bought them because my stock in this area is weak and I find that I can not generally keep them in stock when I do have them as they are extremely popular with collectors.
Before I move on with more posts about the Admiral Issue, I wanted to talk a little bit today about the material issued between 1927 and 1952, as I have for the past month, been organizing my stock of this period and getting it ready for sale. What has struck me the most as I have worked on this material, is just how much variation there is to interest a specialist, and how most of this detail has been ignored by the standard stamp catalogues. This is a pity because to look at the catalogue listings, one can easily come to the conclusion that the issues are straightforward, and that there is little to interest a specialist. Consequently, I believe that very little has been done with this material compared to the popular Large Queens, Small Queens and Admirals.
At last, I return to my detailed posts about the popular Admiral series of 1911-1928. This far I have talked about the difference between wet and dry printings, as well as covering all the major shade varieties to be found on each issue.
However, the next major topic that I have only alluded to in my posts about shades, and one that has not received much attention by Unitrade, is the topic of paper and gum. Those who have been collecting this issue long enough and have a keen eye for detail, will eventually notice certain patterns to the characteristics of the paper and gum types that run across the life of this issue. Once you become familiar with these, it will be much easier to distinguish the various printings and shades of the stamps that you have in your collection.
The conventional wisdom in the hobby that I have always heard growing up is that if you want your stamps to increase in value you should buy the highest value stamps you can since rare stamps will always increase in value, while cheap stamps will always be inexpensive.
About 20 years ago, I predicted that superb mint examples of the low values up to the mid 1930's would increase by much greater amounts than the high value stamps would. My reasoning was rooted in simple economics: there are more collectors who can afford them and all collectors need them to complete their sets. So a collector who has already bought superb examples of the expensive stamps and needs the inexpensive ones, must compete with a larger body of collectors who could not afford the high values, but who can afford the low values. With a limited supply, this could only result in prices increasing.
I had thought that my last post had addressed the request of one of my readers, but I had misunderstood his request. He wanted to know about the shade varieties of the Large Queen Issue, as well as perforations and papers for the purposes of doing an album layout. So I will write a post today about the shades, papers and perforation varieties on this issue before I return to my next post about the Admiral Issue of 1911-1928.