Chapter II

1 King George V
2 Albert
3 Nicholas II
4 Peter
5 Victor Emanuel III
6 Christian X
7 Gustav V
8 Manoel
9 Franz Josef I
10 Alfonso XIII
11 Wilhelmina]

Each postmaster in the early years of the States designed and printed his own stamps, and some weird and curious effects were produced as a result of this arrangement. The master at Milbury, then a tiny place in Massachusetts, issued a two cents label (1847) which was no exception in the matter of design. Milbury was such a small town that the demand for this two cents stamp was insignificant, and consequently to-day copies are worth quite L300.

Another local stamp--more highly priced on the Continent than in England--is the ten centimes "Double Geneva." This curiosity was issued by the Canton of Geneva before Switzerland possessed a regular supply of adhesives. The stamp is composed of two sections, each bearing the value five centimes, but a narrow strip of paper joins them together and bears the value ten centimes. The idea was that, in its entirety, the stamp would frank a letter anywhere within the Canton of Geneva, but if cut in halves, the postage was only sufficient for letters circulating within any individual commune. A complete "Double Geneva" is worth L80 odd unused, but a halved copy may be procured for a L5 note.

Before concluding this chapter on rarities, some mention must be made of the triangular "Capes." Curiously enough, everybody has heard of these stamps, whether they are collectors or not, and every non-collector who happens to possess a copy nourishes the idea that some day a huge fortune may be realized by selling the valued possession. Granted that the specimen is not a forgery, which it very well may be, the stamp is perhaps worth no more than five shillings, for this is the market price of the fourpenny blue, 1855--the stamp most frequently met.

There are two valuable triangular "Capes," however, namely, the fourpenny red and the penny blue, both of 1861. The origin of these stamps is as follows: In making up the dies for printing some penny and fourpenny stamps, a block of the penny stamp was accidentally placed in the plate of the fourpenny value, whilst a fourpenny block found its way into the penny plate. As a result of this mistake, one stamp on each sheet which was printed bore the wrong colour for its value. Gibbons catalogues the blue penny at L85, and the vermilion fourpenny at L95.