Steve Swain has posted another of his richly illustrated articles on the site. U.S. Three Cent Liberty Rainbow Essay Experiment tells the story of one of the lesser know experiments in combating stamp resuse in the latter part of the 19th Century. Many of us are familiar with the stamp grilling methods that ultimately were used to prevent reuse here, but the rainbow printing approach was new information for me.
When I read stories like this, I can’t help but wonder how much of a problem stamp reuse actually was. I’m sure it happened, but it’s hard to imagine that it was worth all the trouble that various governments went to fight it.
re: New Article: U.S. Three Cent Liberty Rainbow Essay Experiment
steve, so richly illustrated. thanks.
are the rainbow liberty heads contemporaneous with the grill issues of the late 1860s? It seems that they would have been the first of our multi-color issues, if so.
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re: New Article: U.S. Three Cent Liberty Rainbow Essay Experiment
Yes, I think it is fair to say that the Liberty essays were contemporaneous with the grill issues of the late 1860s. The "rainbow" varieties began to appear in the 1865-66 timeframe. However, we really cannot tag the rainbows as members of our first multi-color issues because they remained essays, i.e., they were never issued. They would have been beautiful stamps, for sure!
To error is human -to really fowl things up takes a computer 06 Oct 2013 01:59:12pm
re: New Article: U.S. Three Cent Liberty Rainbow Essay Experiment
Very nice article. With all the color variations of the 3 cent Scott #65 just think of the headache you would have trying to figure the color changelings of the Rainbow variety!!
