After yesterday’s highlight of the one cent lemon yellow we will look at two other strong realizations.
Lot 469 — Canada #111 1914 5¢ “Prussian” blue Admiral, deep fresh colour, immaculate, extremely fine, mint never hinged. A lovely shade. Unitrade CV$600; realized $606.
This five cent had several strong advance bids with the second highest being one increment below the high bid on the book. It took the floor only one bid and this lovely stamp sold to a discriminating collector from Ottawa.
Lot 490 — Canada #126a 1924 1¢ yellow Admiral part-perforate, vertical pair, mint never hinged, extremely fine. This issue is actually
surprisingly scarce in true extremely fine quality. Unitrade CV$60; realized $138.
Often these imperforate-between issues are frowned on as “philatelic.” However they are seldom this well-centered and as a result this attracted some strong bids to open at $120 which is double catalogue. Although no one wanted to challenge the high advance bid, this was our top bid and one more bid would have been successful.
In our pre-auction highlights we featured five unique (by virtue of being from the Madagascar Archives) lots from Canada and three unique lots in the worldwide section (two of these were proofs with printer’s notations and notes, the third some original artwork for an Israeli stamp). We cannot report world record realizations for these. Seven of the eight came from one consignor and he was happy because the items sold for more than he expected. However perhaps the fact that all were unique influenced our judgment in estimating. Three sold above our internal estimate and five just below; in one case the hammer was $800 on an estimate of $1500. That lot will please the new owner who had a top bid of $1100.
In writing these commentaries it is tempting to highlight the successes. When we overestimate we want to know why. Well, in the case of unique lots the collector instinct in us gets excited. We won’t apologize for that.