Cherrystone is another auction house where Armenian items can be found from time to time. This time six covers were offered. Two registered covers and four money orders. When browsing the pictures I thought, I have seen those already a couple of time. And so I begun investigating. The Cherrystone website has a nice feature. You can browse the offerings of the auctions that were being held during the last years.
Lets start with the first cover, number 2260.
A pity they show only one side. But here we go. A nice strip of large framed Z on k60k overprints and a bit hard to see large framed Z on a 5 ruble stamp. Some barbarian made a pencil note at the bottom “ARMENIA (SCARCE)”. Departure was on the 15. of April, arrival on the 18 of April, three days later.
If you enter the following search patterns “armenia alexandropol 18.4” in the SEARCH AUCTION LOTS input field and press enter you will get a list of 7 items.
The first two letters from 2010 auctions show a different but very similar cover.
The most obvious difference: the Tiflis arrival cancel is not on the 5 ruble stamp.
That leaves four appearances of the same first cover (also subtraction the double without picture). Apparently the cover was on auction and sold on the following auctions:
- March 2006 with a price realized of $1,400.00
- November 2007 with a price realized of $2,300.00
- November 2009 with a price realized of $2,300.00
- February 2012 with a price realized of $2,300.00
That makes me wonder. Did they really sell this item? Did it fetch the same price three times in a row? Why did no one keep it for some time?
Lets do some more investigating. Lets enter “armenia tiflis 3.50r” into the search field. Again we get seven results and we have two different covers.
A cover with Mikulski and Romeko signatures, no lilac ink remains and only a few pencil markings, also almost no wrinkles.
And a cover with no signatures, but lilac ink remains, wrinkles and a lot of pencil markings (partly erased).
This cover was on auction and sold on the following auctions:
- March 2006 with a price realized of $900.00
- November 2007 with a price realized of $1,400.00
- November 2009 with a price realized of $1,400.00
- February 2012 with a price realized of $1,400.00
Now that strikes me as odd.
Similar results yield searches for the four money transfers from Karmaloo.
