Philatelic Shangri-la: New York Stamp Taxes on Bonds, 1910 –1920: Mortgage Endorsement, Secured Debt and Tax on Investments Stamps, Their Purpose ... Philatelic Subfield Hidden for a Century

2022 Revised Edition including expanded census with 38 illustrated bonds, index, and other changes. Bonds bearing New York’s Mortgage Endorsement, Secured Debt and Tax on Investments stamps of 1910–20 are arguably the most visually stunning items ever to bear stamps. Most of these bonds were issued during the 1880s and 1890s, during the full flowering of America’s Gilded Age, and are correspondingly colorful and ornate. Yet for a century these beautiful pieces and the stamps they bore were virtually unknown to philatelists. For decades they were held as investments, the great majority railroad bonds maturing only after 25, 50 or more years. When railroads consolidated, bonds of the incorporated roads typically passed into the archives of the surviving lines and remained there for more decades. A seminal development for this field was the sale in the late 1980s and early 1990s of the vast archives of the Penn Central railroad system, which had acquired in well over a century scores of earlier roads, most notably the New York Central. Similar “liberations” of other archives occurred, including those of the Baltimore and Ohio and Northern Pacific roads. Even so, virtually all surviving stamped bonds then remained outside the philatelic umbrella, in the hands of dealers in collectible stocks and bonds, for whom the presence of stamps was scarcely mentioned or even noticed. It is only now, fully a century after these stamps were used, that they, and especially the bonds that bear them, have emerged as a significant subfield of fiscal philately, bringing under the philatelic umbrella a panoply of visually stunning documents that otherwise rarely bear stamps. This field is much more, though, than an array of pretty stamped bonds. Here is a complex branch of fiscal history with a broad range of taxes, based on three basic rates and a thousand-fold range in bond amounts (from $100 to $100,000); an array of 33 engraved stamps in denominations from 1¢ to $100 and a rainbow of colors; the option to pay for one, two, three, four or five years; and dozens of distinct cancels used by County Clerks, Comptroller’s agents in Albany and New York, and a newly-identified traveling agent. A deliciously complicated and enjoyable exclamation point is added by the provision that for bonds secured by mortgage of property crossing the New York state line—typically those of interstate railroads—both the Mortgage and Secured Debts/Investments taxes applied. This monograph explains and illustrates in exquisite detail, via surviving bonds, the heretofore mysterious use of the Mortgage Endorsement, Secured Debt, and Tax on Investments stamps. Its 240 pages include more than 200 illustrations, and a census of nearly a thousand recorded stamped bonds. For those collecting in this area it is a definitive “must-have,” but anyone appreciating beautiful and rare philatelic material will enjoy it. Read more