collecting stamps and coins - Specimen bank note archives auction

5630 Dunbar St. at 41st Ave.
604-684-4613

Newsletter #4, November 4th, 2000

Colonies and Provincialism in the 21st Century

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Collectors are the custodians of handfuls of history. We acquire artifacts, arrange them to allow ourselves a sense of control in a chaotic world, then pass them along to the next generation of collectors. Incredible pieces of history often cross our desks.

This week we handled an intercolonial stampless cover that left Quebec City in June 1860, travelled to Montreal, and was then placed in a sealed mail bag for its long journey via New York, overland through Panama, up the west coast to San Francisco, and on to Victoria, Vancouver's Island, where it arrived in September. The cover bore only the Quebec and Montreal cancels, but a Paid handstamp originated in British Columbia, denoting the manuscript payment of 5c for postal charges within the colony. An additional 15c manuscript rating marked postal fees paid for the long journey.

What a wonderful survivor from those far flung colonial days when the Hudson's Bay Company had just relinquished control of Victoria and the Cariboo Gold Rush was just getting underway.

Auctioneer Charles Moore and the Bank of Canada are allowing collectors and dealers another crack at history making this month as session two of the Specimen bank note archives auction takes place in Toronto.

David Hamilton will be attending the sale to bid for dealers and clients. Canadian bank note catalogues are generally excellent at including historical information, and Moore's is no exception. While some may turn their noses up at the relatively modern material offered in this sale, no one can deny the scarcity or historical significance of the items offered. The sale catalogue recounts the history of Canadian bank notes, and the personages involved, and even denies the likelihood of a $5 coin issue.

Promoting collecting confuses us. We want more people to enjoy our hobbies, but we also want to feel special. Not everyone can appreciate an old cover from 1860, but most people can understand the allure of bank notes.

Mass marketing collectibles makes the national mints and postal authorities money, but does it bring new collectors to the hobbies or create unrealistic speculative buyers who will ultimately be disappointed with the values of the investments they believed they were making? The sellers blur the distinction between collecting for fun and accumulating for profit. For example, the Australians managed to get postage stamp portraits of their gold medal winning Olympians into their main post offices within 24 hours of their Olympic achievements. Great marketing and fitting subjects. The stamps sold like gang busters and are trading at big premiums among proud nationals.

Will these jingoistic buyers become stamp collectors or is this just another example of the collector market temporarily crossing into the mass market? How will these handfuls of history fare in the future?

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Newsletter #5: Getting In Line by Going Online

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All Nations Stamp & Coin

5630 Dunbar St. at 41st Ave.
Vancouver, BC, V6N 1W7

Phone: 604-684-4613

e-mail: collect@direct.ca