Phil pages July-Aug-Final - The Royal Philatelic Society of Canada

Figure 2. Stamp approval sheet (1900)
With 48 Central American stamps, half of which are from Salvador. The prices are as marked
above the items. The single most expensive stamp on the sheet is at the lower right corner (purple
Guatemala overprinted, Scott #97), marked at 20¢; its 1964 Scott catalogue value was only $0.25!
sheet with small blobs of glue (.5-1 cm in diameter); presumably,
they would come off with a mild pull but there would be a
risk of a large thin. (I don’t intend to remove them.)
The stamps are from the early to late-1890s, and of course
condition is highly variable. It is clear that dealers and collectors
weren’t terribly fussy about condition; one of the cheaper
stamps, priced at -yellow-brown Honduras Scott #96, issued
1896, value in Scott’s 1964 of $.10 – has been trimmed on the
left to remove the perforations and cut into the design. The
seven best stamps, marked muy raras (very scarce), were
grouped as one lot on the top row, and priced at $1. These are
Salvador Scott’s numbers 192, 195, O49, O115, O106, O52,
and O37, and they are all in surprisingly good condition; their
total catalogue value in 1964 was $35. The total charged for
the page was $2.77.
The accompanying letter also
survived. It is written in Spanish on
both sides of paper that is thin but
not onion skin. The sender, Carlos
F. Padilla of San Salvador, is
responding to a postcard from the
addressee. Senor Padilla also
includes his want list of Canada and
the provinces. His want list included
all the pence issues, cents and
large queens of Canada, the eightcent
registration stamp, and all the
Jubilees but the one, two, and three,
as well as all the stamps of the
provinces. This suggests that perhaps
Senior Padilla was also just a
part-time dealer.
A modern example of an AR
cover is illustrated in Figures 3(a)
and (b). It suffers from the same
“philatelic” stigma – it was mailed
in 1975 by the well-known Toronto
stamp dealer George Wegg to a
client in the United States. Shown
are the cover and the AR card that
was attached to it. The postage paid
on the cover was made up of 50¢
registration fee and 10-cent air mail
rate to the United States. The pink
AR card has a 25-cent stamp
attached, paying for the 15-cent AR
fee plus the fee to return the card by
air (a rate that is difficult to find).
The card was attached by staples.
The whole thing (card still
attached) was returned to sender
(U.S. pointing finger annotated
“moved, left no address”) – but there
is a red handstamp (lower part of the
cover) Service Temporarily
Suspended. A Canadian postal strike
had begun after the cover arrived in the
United States (many Canadian readers
will recall the regular postal strikes of
the 1970s.)
Note the total lack of AR markings on the cover. Only the
attached AR card returned with the cover permits us to conclude
it was sent with AR.
Finally, to see what a real philatelic cover is, examine Figure
4. This is an AR cover mailed from the Sudan (then under
Egyptian control) postmarked Wadi Halfa, March 1898,
addressed to Metz, France. The camel stamps are all different,
with denominations one, two, three and five milliemes of a
pound, and one, two, five and 10 piastres (10 mil to a piastre),
and are beautifully coloured. The correct postage was 30 mil
plus 10 mil for each 15 grams above the first – 10 mil for each
of the registration, AR, and UPU rates – so of course this cover
is grossly overpaid. According to the backstamps, it travelled to
Alexandria, and arrived in Metz just six days later. (It’s possible
this is a first day cover, but I don’t know the date of issue of the
stamps, Scott’s #9-16.)
166 / July – August 2000 The Canadian Philatelist / Le philatéliste canadien