Checks Mix... It's Tasty!

This one may be less interesting to philatelic collectors, but it is now my earliest bank check. You don't see many from the 1820s and this one is engraved, which is even less common.

Lovely! I've not seen one that early with ornate engraving.

There's no printer's imprint on that check, but it probably came from Murray, Draper, Fairman & Co. They had a very distinctive style of ornamentation (no lathework, all hand engraved). If anyone can match up the lady in the boat, let me know.

Isn't the JP & S, No 2 at the bottom right of the lathework an imprint?

JP&S stands for John Pratt & Sons, I think, which appears to be the banking house.

It seems to have gotten quiet in these parts lately, so time for a bump. This was an interesting recent pick-up. It's a federal check, so no revenue stamp, but the subject matter is intriguing. It appears to be made out for a day laborer's wages for "Breaking stone in N. Cap. St." (North Capitol Street).

$32.82 in today's money

I'd bet that the $1.26 bought a lot more for this hard working guy in the 1870's than the $32.82 would for you and I now.

What may appear to be a mundane check from the 1870s is actually a check from the settling of the estate of Samuel Carpenter of Toppan and Carpenter. The guys who printed a lot of stamps from 1851-61. The R135 on it is nicely centered as well. I got it from one of his descendants.

I'm a little late in responding, but that's a very neat check. If I had seen that in a box, I'd have zipped right past it without realizing its historic significance. Thanks for posting that!

Thanks, I found it in a group that also included checks paying bills for the the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia.

Time for a bump-up. Here's a nice little 1867 check that I fished out of a bargain box for a dollar. Not typically something that would catch my eye, but I felt sorry for it.



Why, you ask? Because, when I found it, it looked like this...



One of the boxes I was sorting through was packed with items from the collection of a Detroit stamp collector named Hideaki Nakano (I know this because he rubber stamped his name on nearly everything). Apparently his specialty was taking older collectibles and turning them into modern first day covers. Most of his efforts were benign, but he managed to ruin some really nice older covers that did not need updating. I have no idea what possessed him to attach and cancel an old check or what it has to do with the George Washington stamps, but as an experiment I thought I'd buy a couple to see if I could rescue them. You can still see a little residue at the LR of the check, but fortunately the cancellation didn't disfigure it much.

Nakano's cachets are highly creative and sought-after.

http://goscf.com/t/41764

While he may have "destroyed" a check, I would not try to reverse his work.

P.S. your before/after check images are not of the same check.

Correct, the second one is another piece that hasn't been rescued.

I had never heard of Nakano before. There were a lot of things with his hand stamp going for $1 each at one dealer's table in the APS Chicago show. I bought a few -- some of the thematically linked "updates" were nice, but there were others that seemed to have no connection, and a few that would have been more valuable in their original state.

I hope a collector of that material finds those boxes some day. They will have a field day.

Here is the largest and only bank check price guide I've found . The checks on bay are up a little now. Heh heh