While chatting with Bill Castenholz a few months ago he suggested to me that I should compile some inventories of less common types of revenue stamped paper to be published in The Check Collector, along the lines of the Unlisted in Castenholz articles he supplied in the late 1990's. His suggestions were the colored B's and K's, and perhaps the H instructive clauses. I added the G1a's and G1b's to this wish list.

Instead of any of the above we will begin by updating the list of G3's that Bill published in the July-September 1998 issue. For those of you who do not collect revenue stamped paper, G's are the diamond-shaped imprints produced by the Graphic Company of New York, and G3's are those where the company put their name and city on the imprint in small type. This practice was short lived. Apparently the Bureau of Internal Revenue objected, and the name and city were removed. The vast majority of G's do not bear them.

A proof of stamped paper type G3. Listed in Turner: Impression on India paper: 2¢ Bright red (cut to shape).

Ron Lesher wrote a reply to the Castenholz article in which he supplied some information on the first deliveries of revenue stamped paper by the Graphic Company in November of 1975. He gives a figure of 2,278,070 documents. Since it would have been difficult for the government to have objected to the use of the company name in the imprint before it was first used, could all of these items have borne a G3 imprint? If so, relatively few have survived.

At any rate, the reason for updating this list is that in the eight years since it was published ten more users have been documented, bringing the number known to 48. (Note: several more users have come to light since this article was published in late 2006.)

Not all of the items on the list may be available to collectors. Six of the entires in Bill's list, and eight in the revised list, were reported by Ed Lipson in the November, 1993 Check Collector, and are among the things that disappeared when he moved into a retirement villa. None of these were included in the Kelleher sale of his material in 1999. Another copy of one of them has been located, so the loss nets to seven on the revised list. We can only hope they will turn up someday, or that there are other copies. (Another copy of one of them did appear after this article was originally published. Any that do turn up are moved from the list of missing items to the regular inventory list.)

For those who do not want to make comparisons, the additions to the list are those from Chicago and Palestine, IL; Danville, KY; Boston, MA, National Bank of Redemption; Montclair, NJ; Cooperstown and Rome (unaltered), NY; East Brady and Philadelphia, PA; and Brattleboro, VT. (Since then an altered version of the Lewisburg, NY Union NB has been found, as well as one from Red Bank, NJ, one from Omaha, NE and several from Carlisle, PA.)

Bill Castenholz preferred to see every item in his listings personally, although I believe he used Ed Lipson's 1993 TCC article in compiling his 1998 survey. I have not seen a number of the items in this list, but have provided footnotes for ones not held in several major collections or dealers' stocks. The Lipson items that disappeared are listed separately.

I am beginning to transfer lists of the less common types of revenue stamped paper to the ASCC website. These will have linked images when available. To see the G3 lists, GO HERE.

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