Interesting 1948 Israel Stamps

perf 10x10, Lot 108- Sale #30

I recommend the article "I Printed Israel's First Stamps" by R. Aronsohn, Manager Haaretz Printing Press, Tel Aviv. I located it in issue #2 of "The Holyland Philatelist" from December of 1954. I read somewhere that Stanley Gibbons magazine had reprinted the article and I am certain others have as well.

In the article the author paints the picture of the difficult conditions under which the first stamps of Israel were designed, test printed, printed and perforated. As we have some nice perforation varieties in our Sale 30,  I was interested in the perforating part of the process as Aronsohn described it. To give some background, a printing press was moved under cover of darkness from the Newspaper Haaretz offices to a 2 story house in the old Templar Colony of Sarona (Sarona has an interesting history, you can read about it in this article on Wikipedia ). The house had been used by the Hagana after they drove out the Palestine Police. The secrecy was necessary as the preparation of the stamps was illegal under British rule, and the British had not completely vacated the country yet. As Haaretz was a newspaper, it was decided that it was both too public and full of reporters to ensure that there would be no leaks to the British.

 The original perforating machine was "a small and primitive contrivance, which had to be set in motion by pedals, but which could do the job..." It was a perf 11 machine. Here are some of the stamps which are perforated 11:

Doar Ivri, Lot 119- Sale #30

 The workers soon realized that the perforating would go too slowly with this single machine. At the rate they were able to work they would not  meet their deadline. As the quantity of low value stamps needed was by far the highest, they decided to roulette some of the 3 lower values to relieve the 'bottleneck' created by the pedal-driven perforating machine.

1-3 Rouletted, lot 115- Sale #30 

At some point someone had located another perforating machine which was perforation 10 and brought it to the house in Sarona, some of the sheets were ordered run on the original machine vertically and on the new machine horizontally so work could progress faster, creating the 10x11 perfs:

Lot 116- Sale #30

Again I quote from Aronsohn's article; "It seems that on one occasion, unnoticed at the time, the new perforation machine was used both ways- an oversight which resulted in the very rare 10 x 10 perforation variety." See the strip of 3 mil stamps at top of article, also this one:

Very rare perf 10x10 tab strip with perforated bottom- Lot #123- Sale #30

I have read somewhere that the "perforated base" stamps were prepared for use on Minister's Sheets. These were given out to dignitaries as examples of the stamps of the new state. Normally the 250 and 500 mil values are straight at the bottom, the 1000 mil is normally perforated. Here is an example of a Minister's Sheet: 

1-9 on Minister's Sheet, Lot 131- Sale #30

On this particular Minister's Sheet the 7-9 are all as normally issued, however the 3 mil is perf 10x11 and the 50 mil is perf 10x10. 

As far as valuations of the different perforation varieties pictured above, I will record here what the mint and used tab prices are from the 2013 Bale Catalogue.

1-6 (3 mil to 50 mil) Perf 11 tabs mint $340- tabs used $100

1c-3c (3 mil to 10 mil) Rouletted tabs mint $375- tabs used $155

1d-6d (3,10,20,50 mil) perf 10x11 tabs mint $920 tabs used $500

Perf 10x10 each stamp-

3 mil tab mint $3200, tab used $2000

50 mil tab mint $2800 tab used $2000

250 mil tab mint $2700- unlisted y Bale with perforated base.

If you have any questions or comments you may feel free to contact me gbailey15@gmail.com  . Our sale #30 is now online at www.romanoauctions.com and we should have printed catalogs available in a few days.