Another very rare British Guiana stamp is the sorry-looking two cents of 1851. Having more the appearance of an obliteration stamp than a postal adhesive, this specimen bears the name of the colony and the value, two cents, in a circle. It was printed at short notice by the proprietors of the Royal Gazette, and was intended to serve for a new rate of letter-carrying which applied to the town of Georgetown alone. Apparently the new charge failed to serve its purpose, and was withdrawn after a brief space of time. Very few copies were made use of, and those which still exist are worth about £600 each.
From the Hawaiian Islands comes another valuable stamp, also of poor design: it is the two cents (1851), black on bluish paper. This adhesive was printed at Honolulu, and served mainly for franking the letters which the American missionaries sent home to their relations in the States. The issue suffered an untimely fate, for no sooner had the stamps been put into circulation than a serious fire devastated the quarter of the town in which the post office was situated and destroyed almost all the stock in hand. A round dozen copies are known to exist. One reposes in the Tapling Collection at the British Museum, but the authorities have removed it from the show-cases, where it used to lie, and placed it under lock and key in the Cracherode Room. It may be well to add that it can be inspected on request. Its value is probably £800 or more.
If we turn to the United States, many rarities will be found, but none are so much sought after as the issues known as the "Postmaster Stamps." For the want of a better term these adhesives have been called "locals," but they must not be confused with the worthless labels spoken of in Chapter II.
Portraits of some European Monarchs 1 King George V 2 Albert 3 Nicholas II 4 Peter 5 Victor Emanuel III 6 Christian X 7 Gustav V 8 Manoel 9 Franz Josef I 10 Alfonso XIII 11 Wilhelmina
Each postmaster in the early years of the States designed and printed his own stamps, and some weird and curious effects were produced as a result of this arrangement. The master at Milbury, then a tiny place in Massachusetts, issued a two cents label (1847) which was no exception in the matter of design. Milbury was such a small town that the demand for this two cents stamp was insignificant, and consequently to-day copies are worth quite £300.
Another local stamp—more highly priced on the Continent than in England—is the ten centimes "Double Geneva." This curiosity was issued by the Canton of Geneva before Switzerland possessed a regular supply of adhesives. The stamp is composed of two sections, each bearing the value five centimes, but a narrow strip of paper joins them together and bears the value ten centimes. The idea was that, in its entirety, the stamp would frank a letter anywhere within the Canton of Geneva, but if cut in halves, the postage was only sufficient for letters circulating within any individual commune. A complete "Double Geneva" is worth £80 odd unused, but a halved copy may be procured for a £5 note.
Before concluding this chapter on rarities, some mention must be made of the triangular "Capes." Curiously enough, everybody has heard of these stamps, whether they are collectors or not, and every non-collector who happens to possess a copy nourishes the idea that some day a huge fortune may be realized by selling the valued possession. Granted that the specimen is not a forgery, which it very well may be, the stamp is perhaps worth no more than five shillings, for this is the market price of the fourpenny blue, 1855—the stamp most frequently met.
There are two valuable triangular "Capes," however, namely, the fourpenny red and the penny blue, both of 1861. The origin of these stamps is as follows: In making up the dies for printing some penny and fourpenny stamps, a block of the penny stamp was accidentally placed in the plate of the fourpenny value, whilst a fourpenny block found its way into the penny plate. As a result of this mistake, one stamp on each sheet which was printed bore the wrong colour for its value. Gibbons catalogues the blue penny at £85, and the vermilion fourpenny at £95.