Eastern Highlights

If the first three months of this year are an indication of the quality of the philatelic material that is going to be offered at auction in Canada this year, it's going to be a great year. As usual, top grade material attracts all the attention and the top prices. It remains to be seen whether this will spread to more ordinary material as a result of increased demand. This Eastern auction had some outstanding material, as described below. We start off with two early Canadian classics.

Eastern described the above stamp as “a remarkable mint example of this challenging stamp, reasonably centered for this first perforated issue… still retaining a portion of its original gum, slightly disturbed from hinging." Although listed in Unitrade, no price is provided in the catalogue for either mint or used copies. We checked our records but could find no previous record of a sale of this variety.

This used copy of the 10¢ black brown Albert, perf. 11¼, was quite well centered with a SON four ring “37” (Quebec) cancel. It attracted the second best price we have recorded in the past 19 years.

This beautiful top margin plate block of the $4 Jubilee is every collector’s dream. As can be seen, it is nicely canceled. The more we look at it, the more features we find to admire. We envy the successful bidder. It came from the well-known Fred Jarrett collection auctioned back in 1960.

We can just imagine a collector using a pair of scissors to cut this imperforate sheet into pairs. He or she must have trimmed these pairs carefully in order to produce such large borders. Big borders on some pairs means, unfortunately, that other pairs not shown here would have narrow borders. All three above pairs were XF NH.

This is the third time the above 1¢ imperforate pair has sold for $650 which is its all time best price. The previous best price for the 5¢ pair was $700, so the above $750 is a new record. The previous best price for a 10¢ pair was $860, so the above price of $525 looks like a real bargain.

Surprisingly, in the past 5 years, we have only recorded the sale of 2 NH copies of this stamp. The best price of $450 was realized a year ago. It seems catalogue values are ignored by bidders for this particular stamp. What a beauty!

The quality of the material in this auction continues with these two outstanding stamps:

Not surprisingly, both the above stamps sold for new record prices. The staff at Eastern had trouble containing themselves when describing these two lots “The 1¢ was ‘a superb stamp’. The 2¢ stamp was “an absolute gem worthy of the finest collection”. Their enthusiasm obviously rubbed off on the bidders who responded strongly.

Both stamps were described as XF NH. We were a bit surprised at the divergence in prices and pleased to see that, despite this, both sold for new record prices.

The regular 3¢ stamp is often seen at auctions and a nice VF NH copy recently sold for $75. The previous best price was $350. The 3¢ variety with its distinctive dark rich shade appears very seldom and, in fact, the last sale of this stamp we recorded was in 2006 when a copy sold for $316.

Another beauty from this auction selling for a strong price. It had everything a collector could want, a dark rich colour, NH, well centered, and it came with a Greene Foundation certificate. Even though it sold for almost 3 times catalogue, it could not match the $2,600 realized at an Eastern sale back in 2010. Registered stamps of this caliber are in great demand.

This ends our review of this sale and we feel we have hardly scratched the surface.

Highlights

This sale had 6 new record prices:

Scott	Description	NRP	Previous NRP
12ii	3¢ Beaver major re-entry, psn. 61	7,250	-
70a	5¢ Maple leaf imperforate pair	750	700
89ii	1¢ Edward VII grey green	400	375
90	2¢ Edward VII	950	458
135	3¢ Confederation brown	500	350
135i	3¢ Confederation dark brown	350	316

Eastern’s next sale will be a public auction of “The Montclair Collection”
on May 29-30, 2014 in Halifax

Canadian Stamp Auctions