Raritan is one of the auction houses were you can find Armenian items almost every time. The current auction #70 hold some interesting lots. Most prominently three collections to which I will give some remarks.
Lot #250 Surcharges on the Soviet issue Collection
Nice stamps with no obvious forgeries. 47 items with starting price 475 USD is 10 USD per item which seems not too expensive. Some uncommon variants are included, also some stamps with cancellation.
Lot #254 Surcharges on the First Constantinople issue Collection
A really interesting Lot with many uncommon stamps, lots of readable cancellations and also my personal highlight: 15 Goldkopeck narrow on 250 Rubles stamp. When Ashford and Tchilingharian wrote there books back in 1960 they did not list this stamp. Ceresa did describe it in his books and today is the first time I have seen one with a genuine looking cancellation. This means the stamp has been used and is not “only” some OTC (over the counter) or back office production that never has seen real postal. I would happily pay 100 USD for this stamp alone. The cancel is also one of the more uncommon ones making the item even more “adorable”. With a starting price of 700 USD for 50 items the price for each item is a bit higher then in Lot 250, but given the amount of interesting and not common stamps there is, to my mind, room for some bidding.
Lot #255 Collection on Album Pages
This collection of 162 stamps is priced with only 200 USD which gives a kind of low rate of 1,23456 (LOL) USD each item. While browsing the pages of the collection I could see a lot of forgeries but also genuine overprints. The low starting price shows the auction house detected this too and decided not to go with some fantasy starting price like some others do from time to time.
All together a good job of Raritan on those lots and I am looking forward to see how much each lot will achieve in the end.