pynchon & Company

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Thought this might be useful. It's certainly clear. Be sure to scroll to the link at the bottom, there's plenty of images of these property tax stamps on Derek's blog.

Tax Revenue Stamps
08.02.07 By Derek Dahlsad
As a collector who loves paper and ephemera, like Colin I’ve gravitated to a job 
that lets me touch the stuff on a daily basis. I work for a document imaging 
service, a 21st Century, Paper 2.0 business that takes paper & microfilmed 
documents from recent centuries and digitizes them in anticipation of a 
microficheless future. The afficianado of rarity that the collector in me brings 
to the office loves the fact that from time to time my desk is covered in 
hand-written, leather-bound mid-19th century County Recorder books (…that we 
slice at the spine and feed into a scanner, but I digress). While this isn’t my 
topic today, is shows how I can overlook something every day before realizing 
its collectability.

While proofreading a chunk of mortgages we’d scanned, I happened to notice dark 
rectangles on the pages, something that the microfilm barely picked up and our 
scanners did no better. Out of curiosity, I pulled the film and put it in a 
viewer — to find George Washington’s dour visage peering out at me, 
reversed and in negative.

Rather than just a key question on a 6th grade US History test about the 
Revolutionary War, tax stamps were something more than cause for revolt. They, 
in fact, are almost indistinguishable from postage stamps in scale and purpose. 
When you mail a letter, you purchase a stamp in the amount required for 
delivery, and affix it to the envelope proving that the delivery fee has been 
paid. Revenue stamps work the same way: a document or object requires taxes paid 
upon it, so revenue stamps are purchased in the appropriate amount, and affixed 
to the item requiring proof of payment. These tax stamps I’ve found on property 
documents are IRS stamps to prove that the “documentary” taxes were paid on the 
transfer of property. Rather than requiring the IRS at the time to keep complex, 
detailed payment records (just as how the Post Office doesn’t keep track of what 
you’ve paid to mail), the owning of the stamp proves that taxes were paid.

So, like postage stamps, tax revenue stamps are valuable to a collector of 
little pieces 
of paper. They even are graded much the same way, come in used “cancelled” and 
mint unused forms, and are still associated with the American Philatelic Society 
when it comes to collecting. A difference, however, is the wide variety of 
revenue stamps available.

While the practice has mostly fallen into disuse, in the past most of the 
taxable transactions governed by US law had a stamp issued to accompany it. 
Imports, oil, alcohol, pharmaceuticals, cigarettes, document filings and 
registrations all came in stamp-form at some point in time. That sticker you put 
on your license plate each year is a young relative of the revenue stamp. 
Because of their necessity in doing business, uncancelled copies of revenue 
stamps are quite rare. Hoping to steam off a stamp and add it to a collection 
was made quite difficult to prevent people from re-using the stamps, too: 
devices were made to puncture stamps put on a paper document, and the stamps 
were also designed to double as a ’seal’ on boxes and containers, forcing 
the stamp to be destroyed by opening it. The stamps I’ve seen on legal documents 
are also initialed by an official to indicate they’ve been used. Their purpose 
to prevent tax evasion was etched into permanence, so encountering these stamps
 in a useful form can be difficult.

Do not fret, however: these stamps were produced in such enormous numbers, from 
nearly every country, that many did survive their cruise through commerce 
waters. The prime place to check for these stamps are on the bottoms, backs, or 
lids of “restricted” products like tobacco or alcohol, or on paper related to a 
financial transaction.

Revenue stamps can also add additional depth to an existing collection. Consider 
a bottle collector — there’s a point where common bottles are of little 
use…unless you start weighing at the stamp on the bottle’s neck. License plate 
collectors can add vehicle tax stamps, which were often inside the car rather 
than on the bumper. Scripophilists (collectors of stock certificates and the 
like) can add 
documentary stamps to their collectible target. The revenue stamp’s ancillary 
value to a collection can add a bit of color, and a degree of context, to an 
otherwise simple or small collection.

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