Why All The Imperfs In The Early 20th Century (Pre-Farley)?

I have a very few examples of private perforations in my piles of stuff so I can't say I've ever been an active collector of these.  I had always thought that the stamps were provided to the private perforation companies in long imperforate coils (from an engineering standpoint, it's much easier for me to conceive of a way to build a machine which perforates a big long coil of stamps, rather than sheets).  So, on looking a bit further, I was surprised to read in this article on The Swedish Tiger that some private perf companies could in fact perforate sheets - their machines would take an imperf sheet, perforate the stamps, split the sheet into strips and join the strips into coils, providing their further customers (the people who used machines to automatically affix stamps to envelopes) with a big long coil of these private perfs.  There were in fact long coils of imperforate stamps provided to the private perf people, but that wasn't the only way it was done.

Blocks of private perforation stamps are far less common than coil strips but they do exist.  Since many of these private perfs are rare, they're a somewhat popular collecting field for the fabulously well-to-do collector (as Kurt Vonnegut would say).  Here's a good article found on Stamp News Online reviewing an auction held to sell a collection of private perfs.



Ryan