Stamp Taxes in Nevada II. Adhesive Revenue Stamps of Nevada, 1865–1873

This monograph is the result of efforts to revise the listings of Nevada’s classic 1865–73 issues in the State Revenue Society’s 2007 State Revenue Stamps Catalog. A preliminary version was the basis for the extensively revised listings in the Society’s 2013 State Revenue Catalog. Previous efforts to characterize these stamps foundered on two obstacles: First, measuring the gauge of rouletted stamps is difficult and often impossible using the traditional perforation gauge and magnifying glass. This problem has been completely surmounted here using a computer-based method. Second, even when a given stamp has been properly identified, determining the duration of its use has been handicapped by a paucity of material in the hands of the analysts; collectors have been understandably reluctant to accumulate the hundreds of duplicates necessary for this task. This obstacle is circumvented here by two mechanisms. The stamps on which the anaysis was primarily based were not loose, but affixed to hundreds of revenue-stamped documents, assembled over four decades with an eye not only for their stamps, but also the document types and tax rates, origins, users — in short, every aspect that makes a document collectable. Thus for example, many receipts bearing the same 2¢ stamp had been added with no sense of duplication, as they were all from different companies, for different sorts of goods, some with unusual layouts, illustrations, imprints, and so on. A side benefit of using on-document stamps is that the date of use is always evident, even when when missing from the cancel, as is often the case.The second useful mechanism is another byproduct of the computer age: the greatly increased ease of communication with fellow collectors, who added key off-document stamps to the database via scanning and email. The proposed listings comprise the final chapter here (pp. 139–142) and are previewed on p. 4. Read more