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Let's use this meeting topic to have a bit of a go at Barefoot's catalogue prices. Anyone else think they're unreasonably high? Case in point -
Japanese Occupation of Burma "special adhesive" revenues
Here's a set of unused singles, minus the rather difficult lowest value, 25c orange. None of these values are that common, I grant you, but recently a bunch of sheets came onto the market, via Thailand and Singapore. Cut up into small blocks or singles, they're now spread around hopeful dealers in the US, Canada, wherever. All this material came from the estate of the Ka Ka brothers, who were well known in the Burma stamp trade in 1945 and the aftermath, and whose descendants still held onto some boxes of stock, which they have sold on in recent years. A couple of months ago a well known London dealer (not Gibbons) offered a set of sheets (64 stamps to the sheet) of these eight values in their price list, hyping up the offering with paragraphs of purple prose about how these sheets were spirited away from under the noses of the retreating Japanese forces by an enterprising postmaster etc etc, all of which bears only a tangential relation to the truth. Asking price for the eight sheets? £12,000, no less. Whaaaaattt??? But that was based on a calculation of 50% of Barefoot. My polite enquiry to the dealer as to whether these have yet been sold, and if so at what price, has met with a stony silence. I think I paid about $50 for my set of eight singles, and I've seen them go for twice that. Anything higher than that on eBay, and they sit unsold. Yes, Barefoot got in on the ground floor when it came to speculative valuations of revenues ..... Richard W.
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on Nov-25-07
at 23:11:58 PST
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member
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on Nov-25-07
at 15:36:35 PST
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on Nov-25-07
at 08:27:13 PST
I'm a catalog queen, expert and philatelist - whoopee!!
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