Proprietary Company Cancellations on Regular Issue U.S. Revenue Stamps 1862-1883: A Fiscal History Study

This book is a compendium of articles, concerning the cancellations used by various companies subject to the Civil War Proprietary stamp tax. All of these pieces appeared in The American Revenuer, the house organ of the American Revenue Association, the largest revenue stamp collector organization in the United States.The main emphasis of most of the articles is on the letterpress printed precancellations. The use of these overprints allowed a given proprietor to secure his stock of regular proprietary stamps to the same extent as those who used a private die stamp, but at a much more reasonable cost. Most such precancels consist only of a set of initials and a date. While the proprietors of many such cancels have been accurately identified over the years, many errors nonetheless persisted in the literature and others looked to remain unidentified forever. This bothered me. How does one identify the user of a particular precancelled revenue stamp when the stamp is no longer affixed to the product container? I believed that there had to be a way, not necessarily a single way, but probably many ways.In each article I attempted to take the reader on the same journey that I took in discovering who used the cancel under scrutiny, what products they made and where they made them. In this way, the reader can understand my techniques and reasoning used in working out whatever mystery then lay before me begging for a solution. In this way, what might otherwise be considered a dry recitation of facts, begins to come alive, exposing all of the quirks and chicanery of the mercantile world of 19th Century America. These stamps and the various products they taxed existed in a context that is difficult for most of us to comprehend today. It was long before truth in advertising, disclosure of ingredients, warning labels, the Pure Food and Drug Act and other laws and regulations that we take for granted today. It was indeed the wild west of merchandising.Major categories addressed in the book include:Patent MedicinePlaying CardsCosmeticsMatchesCanned GoodsGeneral Proprietary CompoundsPrivate die proprietary stamps have been written about extensively over the years, and all are identified as to their user by their very nature. Not so with most of the overprinted regular issue stamps. This area of fiscal philately has been neglected far too long and t this volume will in some small measure begin to set the matter right. Read more