Postal Stationary

Postal Stationary is a fun area to collect. The majority of the items are inexpensive, and seem to be readily available. One exception to this is the PC3 FDC. This one took me a long time to track down. I have seen it for sale in several auctions, but the start price was always more than I wanted to pay. I saw this one included in a postal stationary collection offered on E-bay. There was no mention of PC3 in the description, but looking at the photos in the lot, I was pretty sure that I saw a PC3 FDC in the pictures. I ended up buying the whole collection for about $20, which is well under what this single piece catalogs for. I still have the rest of the collection, I will probably put it back on E-bay one of these days, and hopefully get my $20 back.

Some of the harder items to find are the airletter sheets that were issued without value. There were 3 or 4 of these issued over the years, and finding them in either Mint or FDC is not easy, but they are still relatively inexpensive.

The only airletter sheets that I have been unable to find are AS60 and 61 (according to Bale 98, apparently newer versions of the catalog changed the number system for some reason, not sure why, and I will continue to use the 98 numbering system personally). These sheets are ones that had stamps added to make up the current rate. My Bale 98 catalog shows these at a reasonable price, but in the latest Negev auction, the 2 started at $150. This is way above my price range for these. Shown here is AS59, which is very similar to AS60 and 61, the only difference being additional stamps added for the latter ones. Since AS60 is pictured on the cover of the Negev auction catalog, I was able to see that adding a 15 shekel stamp to AS59 would give me AS60. Since the stamp is available for pennies, what would prevent this from occurring? How can you tell if one had the stamps added at the time of sale, or after? I guess with used versions we could at least tell that the addition of the stamp occurred in the right time frame, but for mint copies, how could we? So, I can't see how the price could be so high. That being said, the one on the cover of the Negev catalog is the only one I have ever seen, so people must not be doing it. Your thoughts?