Discussion - Member to Member Sales - Research Center
Discussion - Member to Member Sales - Research Center
I inherited an amazing stash of over 11,000 of these! They had been collected in the early 1890s at Union City, Indiana and had been bundled (100 per bundle) and tied with thread or string. I was the lucky soul who unbundled them. This was part of a story I wrote several years ago and you can read it here if interested.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/138279679/Rediscovering-a-Philatelic-Hoard-an-Unexpected-Journey-with-addendum
I no longer collect at all and never had an interest in postal stationery, but this unique stash of cut squares intrigued me and I spent some time trying to figure them out. I haven’t done much with them in recent years. A guy in California also had a large collection of these. He and I were working on cataloging them and identifying new die varieties when his health issues intervened. His collection is now with UPSS and they were supposedly developing a project to better describe these. I don’t know the status of that project.
As far as I know, no one has ever presented side by side the known color varieties of the 2c Washington indicium. So, I pulled out some examples, laid them on the scanner glass and created this image. I hope you find it helpful.
This second image shows that I attempted in 2008 to get APEX to recognize the blue-green color that was listed in the 2001 UPSS catalog. They seem to have sidestepped the issue and I never followed up with them. Maybe I should have created my image of all the color varieties and sent it to APEX back then.
(Modified by Moderator on 2015-11-07 19:31:05)
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Nice post, keesindy.
I have argued the Die 88 color issues with the editor of the UPSS's 19th Century Catalog of Stamped envelopes and a few other collectors/dealers for a long tie. I'm trying to get the listings expanded.
If you look at the listings for Die 88, you will see the Purcells will have listings for Dark Green and Yellow Green. In your collage of cut squares, I judge the second example in the second row to be Dark Green, and the first example in the third row to be Yellow Green. First complaint I have is that there is no listing for the Purcell with just plain old ordinary Green. Those envelopes exist and are not rare. Second complaint is that there are no listings for Dark Green or Yellow Green for the Plimpton & Morgan Die 88s. These also exist, and I would judge them to be rarer than the ordinary Green Purcells, but not in the "put your kids thru college" kind of rare.
I think the problem goes back to the Scott catalog (and in particular, the U.S. Specialized), which is a cut square catalog (even though they have entries for "entires"). I believe they tried to create a listing for the Purcells with the U311a catalog number, which describes a Dark Green stamp.
In a similar fashion, they try to carve out the early 3 cent circular issue by calling it Dark Violet, with the later run being identified as Purple. This works most of the time, though there are color variations of the later run that are essentially Dark Violet. The real way to tell the difference is to examine the watermark, which you can't do with a cut square catalog.
So, I think we need a catalog entry for Dark Green Plimpton & Morgan U311's, and a catalog entry for ordinary Green Purcells.
The Yellow Green is a more elusive color from my experience, but I'm sure a similar argument can be made of it.
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Thanks for commenting, Thomas. You are clearly more knowledgeable and more invested in the Die 88s than I am. I barely scratched the surface of this complex group back when I was trying to make sense of it all. I just didn't have the time available to pursue it. Your comments remind me of some of the voids in my basic knowledge. Maybe some day I can spend some more time with these!
A couple of questions........
Have your discussions with the UPSS catalog editor involved the blue green color that was listed in the 2001 catalog? What is your opinion regarding the blue green color? What is your interpretation of the language presented in my APEX cert?
You didn't mention the first example in the second row of my cut squares. It's darker green than the vast majority of the cut squares and I've got a few that are this shade or slightly darker. Do you suppose it is just too close to the standard shade of green to be considered separately?
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"Have your discussions with the UPSS catalog editor involved the blue green color that was listed in the 2001 catalog? What is your opinion regarding the blue green color? What is your interpretation of the language presented in my APEX cert?"
I don't have access to a copy of the 2001 version of the 19th Century catalog, but the last two versions list a Die 88 on manila (UPSS # 1005a-10) as being blue green. Maybe you could post a screen clip of the blue green listing from the 2001 cat.? We could see if they are the same.
Assuming the current catalog has basically the same listings as the 2001 catalog, the amber paper of your cut square would preclude a blue green finding on the cert.
Even a blue green on manila cut square would not get you the certification ruling you want. Since the Dark Green Purcells are a blue green, and many of them are inexpensive, you couldn't "prove" your cut square came from an envelope that matched the parameters of the rare blue green.
The terminology used by APEX on your cert is basically stating that your green stamp is from a spectrum of green found on the 2 cent Plimpton & Morgan/Purcell issue. It would be interesting to see what they would say if you submitted a Purcell Dark Green entire.
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"You didn't mention the first example in the second row of my cut squares. It's darker green than the vast majority of the cut squares and I've got a few that are this shade or slightly darker. Do you suppose it is just too close to the standard shade of green to be considered separately?"
The truth is, all of these greens occur across a spectrum. These guys mixed their own inks and there was quite a variation in the shades used.
I called the editor of the 19th Century catalog and posed the problem we are discussing. He agrees there are "ordinary" Greens on the Purcells and Dark Greens on the Plimpton & Morgan envelopes.
As a footnote: The way you tell a Purcell from a P&M is by the knife. The side flaps are folded right over left (R/L) on P&M envelopes. The Purcells, using English machinery, had L/R side flaps.
I think a fun collection would be to line up as many different shades of green found on the U311 issue as you could find. With a color picker software program (many of which are free), you could create an interesting scatter diagram.
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Thanks for your replies,Thomas.
I wish I could post a scan of the blue green listing from the 2001 UPSS catalog as you suggest, but I sold that copy when I bought the 2012 edition of the catalog. I scanned the pages showing the Dickinson varieties since I quickly realized they were omitted from the newer catalog, but didn't realize until after I sold the older catalog that blue green had been dropped from the new edition. I'm guessing the 2001 listing was identical to what you're seeing.
Thanks for your observations re the cert. I understand the dilemma that UPSS and APEX face when dealing with shades.
I've seen the wide spectrum (continuum?) of greens. I've got some that are almost blue green, but the two shown in my original post are the bluest of the blue greens I have found.
I haven't paid much attention to the P & M vs. Purcell differences because I'm dealing with cut squares. It's a definite handicap and one of many reasons why I began to focus on die varieties and cancels before setting the cut squares aside a few years ago.
I've recently resurrected my plan to write a brief and generalized local history piece about this large group of cut squares. I've got thousands of them with identifiable post offices of origin. All were collected in Union City, mostly from 1891-93. They're essentially a snapshot of Union City's business ties to the rest of the country. If I had thousands of entires to work with, this could be an amazing in depth study. As it is, I don't know who was sending all this mail and have only a handful of clues (on over-size cut squares) of the local recipient businesses. It's a unique and very generalized perspective of how Union City businesses were interacting with the regional and the national economies. I'm involved with local history groups and think they will appreciate it.
I'm not familiar with the color picker programs. I'll have to take a look when I have some time. With thousands of these things available to analyze, I've got a distinct advantage over most collectors. Just too much to do and too little time................
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"I'm not familiar with the color picker programs."
Try Color Cop (colorcop.net). It's free (I donate to support his efforts). It has a feature that I believe is essential to those of us working with scans of stamps/indicia. It will give a color average over a user-specifiable square region (typically, a 5 to 10 pixel square, in my experience). A typical color picker user will be a web designer who is interested in matching colors or tweaking a color. But, they typically are only interested in a single pixel (out of a color area that is totally uniform).
The color part of a stamp's image is not going to be uniform, so we need some sort of average color.
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As an example of using Color Cop, we take the upper screen clip: After firing up Color Cop, I selected an area to get the RGB values for some green color (I picked the area just behind Washington's head). The immediate pixels around the point I selected are displayed in the window at the lower right of the Color Cop window. I clicked on the center point of where I wanted a color sample, and Color Cop averaged the color values and presented that color in the window at the center top of the Color Cop window.
Isn't it interesting that both images contain roughly the same amount of blue.
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Thanks for sharing this! This is what the Photoshop Color Sampler and Eyedropper Tools do. I use Photoshop for other work I do on a regular basis. So, I'm familiar with it and simply use it for virtually everything I'm doing with images.
In Photoshop (my copy is two generations old), the number of pixels sampled/picked is limited to six fixed selections from 1 x 1 up to 101 x 101. The Sampler allows the user to select up to four semi-fixed locations on an image, but I very rarely us it. (I say "semi-fixed" because they can be moved or easily deleted.) The Eyedropper is more dynamic. It allows the user to read RGB (and CMYK) colors across an image and to select one of those colors as the "foreground" color and another as the "background" color.
I use the Eyedropper fairly often to look at color values. It is probably most useful in my case for removing color casts from scanned images if there are gray tones to use as a basis for making the adjustments. Gray tones in cut square and stamp scans are rare, even with cancelled material since background colors tend to blend with cancellation ink.
I should be including a grayscale chart with each important scan in order to have a control scale within the scanned image, but rarely take the time to do that.
Another interesting tool in Photoshop that I have experimented with is the Noise Reduction Filter. I don't have problems when scanning cut squares, but scans of stamps are sometimes loaded with color artifacts. I think the problem is caused by the reflective qualities of some inks and to the uneven surfaces, particularly with engraved stamps. The noise is sometimes severe enough to alter noticeably the appearance of the scanned objects. The Noise Reduction filter includes several different adjustments. I haven't mastered it. Sometimes it works very well in eliminating the noise without altering the look of the scanned image and sometimes it doesn't.
You've rekindled my interest in my cut square hoard! I think I'll post a couple of things I've discovered in that hoard before returning to my other work in progress.
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I have always wanted to get into Photoshop, but price kept me away. Finally, not long ago, I decided I would bite the bullet. Then I learned they were selling it by the subscription model. Microsoft has done the same thing with Office. It threw me off. Haven't bought anything, yet.
I suppose I will recover and get back in line for whatever Photoshop is now called (Creative Cloud??).
At least you've given me a reason to spring with your description of color functions.
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I first got Photoshop for my antique photo restoration business many years ago. It was bundled with my first scanner many years ago. That initial scanner cost more than the two subsequent replacements and the 2 (or 3?) PS upgrades over the years! I've updated PS every 2-3 generations. My CS5 is now two generations old. I skipped the next version (CS6?) and intended to upgrade with the following generation. That turned out to be the current subscription cloud version. I can't afford it and, at this point in my life, will probably never subscribe. I've thought about going back and upgrading to the prior version (CS6?), but haven't made any effort to do that either. CS5 still does everything I need from PS.
Adobe has been upgrading their Elements version significantly in recent years, but I don't know how far it has come wrt comparison with a CS5 or CS6 Photoshop capabilities. That might be (or become) an option some day for those of us who are not served by the Photoshop subscription cloud model.
Photoshop has a steep learning curve, partly because it's such a massive product with so many tools—and some quirks. In many cases, it provides multiple methods of doing various things and it's a matter of finding what works best for your specific project(s). There are large swaths of PS's capabilities that I've never used—and haven't needed. However, for what I've been able to accomplish with it over the years, it's been worth the price of admission.
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The 2c green Washington 1886-1898 printed by Plimpton & Morgan and by Purcell must be one of the most common types of postal stationery ever produced. Its history led to Scott’s listing of three different designs—U70, U71 and U72—with various colors for both the paper and the indicium for each design. As if that weren’t enough, the 2001 version of the UPSS Catalog of the 19th Century Stamped Envelopes… included a list and drawings (by H. S. Dickinson, 1955) of 29 die varieties.
I inherited an amazing stash of over 11,000 of these! They had been collected in the early 1890s at Union City, Indiana and had been bundled (100 per bundle) and tied with thread or string. I was the lucky soul who unbundled them. This was part of a story I wrote several years ago and you can read it here if interested.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/138279679/Rediscovering-a-Philatelic-Hoard-an-Unexpected-Journey-with-addendum
I no longer collect at all and never had an interest in postal stationery, but this unique stash of cut squares intrigued me and I spent some time trying to figure them out. I haven’t done much with them in recent years. A guy in California also had a large collection of these. He and I were working on cataloging them and identifying new die varieties when his health issues intervened. His collection is now with UPSS and they were supposedly developing a project to better describe these. I don’t know the status of that project.
As far as I know, no one has ever presented side by side the known color varieties of the 2c Washington indicium. So, I pulled out some examples, laid them on the scanner glass and created this image. I hope you find it helpful.
This second image shows that I attempted in 2008 to get APEX to recognize the blue-green color that was listed in the 2001 UPSS catalog. They seem to have sidestepped the issue and I never followed up with them. Maybe I should have created my image of all the color varieties and sent it to APEX back then.
(Modified by Moderator on 2015-11-07 19:31:05)
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re: Uncommon 2c 1890s Plimpton & Morgan / Purcell indicium colors
Nice post, keesindy.
I have argued the Die 88 color issues with the editor of the UPSS's 19th Century Catalog of Stamped envelopes and a few other collectors/dealers for a long tie. I'm trying to get the listings expanded.
If you look at the listings for Die 88, you will see the Purcells will have listings for Dark Green and Yellow Green. In your collage of cut squares, I judge the second example in the second row to be Dark Green, and the first example in the third row to be Yellow Green. First complaint I have is that there is no listing for the Purcell with just plain old ordinary Green. Those envelopes exist and are not rare. Second complaint is that there are no listings for Dark Green or Yellow Green for the Plimpton & Morgan Die 88s. These also exist, and I would judge them to be rarer than the ordinary Green Purcells, but not in the "put your kids thru college" kind of rare.
I think the problem goes back to the Scott catalog (and in particular, the U.S. Specialized), which is a cut square catalog (even though they have entries for "entires"). I believe they tried to create a listing for the Purcells with the U311a catalog number, which describes a Dark Green stamp.
In a similar fashion, they try to carve out the early 3 cent circular issue by calling it Dark Violet, with the later run being identified as Purple. This works most of the time, though there are color variations of the later run that are essentially Dark Violet. The real way to tell the difference is to examine the watermark, which you can't do with a cut square catalog.
So, I think we need a catalog entry for Dark Green Plimpton & Morgan U311's, and a catalog entry for ordinary Green Purcells.
The Yellow Green is a more elusive color from my experience, but I'm sure a similar argument can be made of it.
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re: Uncommon 2c 1890s Plimpton & Morgan / Purcell indicium colors
Thanks for commenting, Thomas. You are clearly more knowledgeable and more invested in the Die 88s than I am. I barely scratched the surface of this complex group back when I was trying to make sense of it all. I just didn't have the time available to pursue it. Your comments remind me of some of the voids in my basic knowledge. Maybe some day I can spend some more time with these!
A couple of questions........
Have your discussions with the UPSS catalog editor involved the blue green color that was listed in the 2001 catalog? What is your opinion regarding the blue green color? What is your interpretation of the language presented in my APEX cert?
You didn't mention the first example in the second row of my cut squares. It's darker green than the vast majority of the cut squares and I've got a few that are this shade or slightly darker. Do you suppose it is just too close to the standard shade of green to be considered separately?
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re: Uncommon 2c 1890s Plimpton & Morgan / Purcell indicium colors
"Have your discussions with the UPSS catalog editor involved the blue green color that was listed in the 2001 catalog? What is your opinion regarding the blue green color? What is your interpretation of the language presented in my APEX cert?"
I don't have access to a copy of the 2001 version of the 19th Century catalog, but the last two versions list a Die 88 on manila (UPSS # 1005a-10) as being blue green. Maybe you could post a screen clip of the blue green listing from the 2001 cat.? We could see if they are the same.
Assuming the current catalog has basically the same listings as the 2001 catalog, the amber paper of your cut square would preclude a blue green finding on the cert.
Even a blue green on manila cut square would not get you the certification ruling you want. Since the Dark Green Purcells are a blue green, and many of them are inexpensive, you couldn't "prove" your cut square came from an envelope that matched the parameters of the rare blue green.
The terminology used by APEX on your cert is basically stating that your green stamp is from a spectrum of green found on the 2 cent Plimpton & Morgan/Purcell issue. It would be interesting to see what they would say if you submitted a Purcell Dark Green entire.
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re: Uncommon 2c 1890s Plimpton & Morgan / Purcell indicium colors
"You didn't mention the first example in the second row of my cut squares. It's darker green than the vast majority of the cut squares and I've got a few that are this shade or slightly darker. Do you suppose it is just too close to the standard shade of green to be considered separately?"
The truth is, all of these greens occur across a spectrum. These guys mixed their own inks and there was quite a variation in the shades used.
I called the editor of the 19th Century catalog and posed the problem we are discussing. He agrees there are "ordinary" Greens on the Purcells and Dark Greens on the Plimpton & Morgan envelopes.
As a footnote: The way you tell a Purcell from a P&M is by the knife. The side flaps are folded right over left (R/L) on P&M envelopes. The Purcells, using English machinery, had L/R side flaps.
I think a fun collection would be to line up as many different shades of green found on the U311 issue as you could find. With a color picker software program (many of which are free), you could create an interesting scatter diagram.
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re: Uncommon 2c 1890s Plimpton & Morgan / Purcell indicium colors
Thanks for your replies,Thomas.
I wish I could post a scan of the blue green listing from the 2001 UPSS catalog as you suggest, but I sold that copy when I bought the 2012 edition of the catalog. I scanned the pages showing the Dickinson varieties since I quickly realized they were omitted from the newer catalog, but didn't realize until after I sold the older catalog that blue green had been dropped from the new edition. I'm guessing the 2001 listing was identical to what you're seeing.
Thanks for your observations re the cert. I understand the dilemma that UPSS and APEX face when dealing with shades.
I've seen the wide spectrum (continuum?) of greens. I've got some that are almost blue green, but the two shown in my original post are the bluest of the blue greens I have found.
I haven't paid much attention to the P & M vs. Purcell differences because I'm dealing with cut squares. It's a definite handicap and one of many reasons why I began to focus on die varieties and cancels before setting the cut squares aside a few years ago.
I've recently resurrected my plan to write a brief and generalized local history piece about this large group of cut squares. I've got thousands of them with identifiable post offices of origin. All were collected in Union City, mostly from 1891-93. They're essentially a snapshot of Union City's business ties to the rest of the country. If I had thousands of entires to work with, this could be an amazing in depth study. As it is, I don't know who was sending all this mail and have only a handful of clues (on over-size cut squares) of the local recipient businesses. It's a unique and very generalized perspective of how Union City businesses were interacting with the regional and the national economies. I'm involved with local history groups and think they will appreciate it.
I'm not familiar with the color picker programs. I'll have to take a look when I have some time. With thousands of these things available to analyze, I've got a distinct advantage over most collectors. Just too much to do and too little time................
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re: Uncommon 2c 1890s Plimpton & Morgan / Purcell indicium colors
"I'm not familiar with the color picker programs."
Try Color Cop (colorcop.net). It's free (I donate to support his efforts). It has a feature that I believe is essential to those of us working with scans of stamps/indicia. It will give a color average over a user-specifiable square region (typically, a 5 to 10 pixel square, in my experience). A typical color picker user will be a web designer who is interested in matching colors or tweaking a color. But, they typically are only interested in a single pixel (out of a color area that is totally uniform).
The color part of a stamp's image is not going to be uniform, so we need some sort of average color.
Login to Like
this post
re: Uncommon 2c 1890s Plimpton & Morgan / Purcell indicium colors
As an example of using Color Cop, we take the upper screen clip: After firing up Color Cop, I selected an area to get the RGB values for some green color (I picked the area just behind Washington's head). The immediate pixels around the point I selected are displayed in the window at the lower right of the Color Cop window. I clicked on the center point of where I wanted a color sample, and Color Cop averaged the color values and presented that color in the window at the center top of the Color Cop window.
Isn't it interesting that both images contain roughly the same amount of blue.
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re: Uncommon 2c 1890s Plimpton & Morgan / Purcell indicium colors
Thanks for sharing this! This is what the Photoshop Color Sampler and Eyedropper Tools do. I use Photoshop for other work I do on a regular basis. So, I'm familiar with it and simply use it for virtually everything I'm doing with images.
In Photoshop (my copy is two generations old), the number of pixels sampled/picked is limited to six fixed selections from 1 x 1 up to 101 x 101. The Sampler allows the user to select up to four semi-fixed locations on an image, but I very rarely us it. (I say "semi-fixed" because they can be moved or easily deleted.) The Eyedropper is more dynamic. It allows the user to read RGB (and CMYK) colors across an image and to select one of those colors as the "foreground" color and another as the "background" color.
I use the Eyedropper fairly often to look at color values. It is probably most useful in my case for removing color casts from scanned images if there are gray tones to use as a basis for making the adjustments. Gray tones in cut square and stamp scans are rare, even with cancelled material since background colors tend to blend with cancellation ink.
I should be including a grayscale chart with each important scan in order to have a control scale within the scanned image, but rarely take the time to do that.
Another interesting tool in Photoshop that I have experimented with is the Noise Reduction Filter. I don't have problems when scanning cut squares, but scans of stamps are sometimes loaded with color artifacts. I think the problem is caused by the reflective qualities of some inks and to the uneven surfaces, particularly with engraved stamps. The noise is sometimes severe enough to alter noticeably the appearance of the scanned objects. The Noise Reduction filter includes several different adjustments. I haven't mastered it. Sometimes it works very well in eliminating the noise without altering the look of the scanned image and sometimes it doesn't.
You've rekindled my interest in my cut square hoard! I think I'll post a couple of things I've discovered in that hoard before returning to my other work in progress.
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re: Uncommon 2c 1890s Plimpton & Morgan / Purcell indicium colors
I have always wanted to get into Photoshop, but price kept me away. Finally, not long ago, I decided I would bite the bullet. Then I learned they were selling it by the subscription model. Microsoft has done the same thing with Office. It threw me off. Haven't bought anything, yet.
I suppose I will recover and get back in line for whatever Photoshop is now called (Creative Cloud??).
At least you've given me a reason to spring with your description of color functions.
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this post
re: Uncommon 2c 1890s Plimpton & Morgan / Purcell indicium colors
I first got Photoshop for my antique photo restoration business many years ago. It was bundled with my first scanner many years ago. That initial scanner cost more than the two subsequent replacements and the 2 (or 3?) PS upgrades over the years! I've updated PS every 2-3 generations. My CS5 is now two generations old. I skipped the next version (CS6?) and intended to upgrade with the following generation. That turned out to be the current subscription cloud version. I can't afford it and, at this point in my life, will probably never subscribe. I've thought about going back and upgrading to the prior version (CS6?), but haven't made any effort to do that either. CS5 still does everything I need from PS.
Adobe has been upgrading their Elements version significantly in recent years, but I don't know how far it has come wrt comparison with a CS5 or CS6 Photoshop capabilities. That might be (or become) an option some day for those of us who are not served by the Photoshop subscription cloud model.
Photoshop has a steep learning curve, partly because it's such a massive product with so many tools—and some quirks. In many cases, it provides multiple methods of doing various things and it's a matter of finding what works best for your specific project(s). There are large swaths of PS's capabilities that I've never used—and haven't needed. However, for what I've been able to accomplish with it over the years, it's been worth the price of admission.
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