STAMP COLLECTIONS

Dominion, Volume 31, Issue 142, 12 March 1938, Page 8 (Supplement)

STAMP COLLECTIONS

High Prices Paid One of the world’s celebrated collections of air-mail stamps and covers, assembled by Roger Steffan, a vicepresident of the National City Bank, New York, was sold for approximately 75,300 dollars recently. The record price was 8200 dollars for the "famous Honduras red,” so-called because of a red overprint on a Honduras five-centa-vos blue stamp issued in 1925. Two other Honduran rarities brought 4300 dollars and 4000 dollars. Collectors and dealers paid more than 24,000 dollars for seventy-two Honduran items. Emil Brueehig, New York, gave 3900 dollars for one of the eighty-one existing full-perforated copies of the scarcest United States air stamp— the 24-cent. carmine and blue of 1918 with centre inverted. Formerly owned by the late Colonel E. H. R. Green, it was part of a sheet that eluded the scrutiny of a clerk during the day’s sales at the Washington, D.C., Post Office. Mr. Brueehig paid 3100 dollars for a superb copy of Newfoundland’s De Pinedo 60cent. black of 1927, one of philately’s most prized items. Ten other rarities from Mexico, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, China, Newfoundland. Russia, Bolivia, Honduras and Australia, brought prices ranging from 070 dollars to 2200 dollars, and about fifty other stamps sold for more than 200 dollars each. Some of the items brought higher than prevailing catalogue values.

One of the auction’s features was that some of the outstanding stamp's were purchased by an agent for a London dealer, suggesting to informed philatelists that certain rarities that have been in America from the time they were issued will soon repose in European collections.