More information on the ‘War Stamp’ overprints of 1917

U.S. Stamp Notes by John M. Hotchner

Linn’s Stamp News readers reacted to my July 8, 2024, article titled “Calling it like it is: World War I war tax” that presented the 1¢ War Stamp overprint strip of 1917, seen here in Figure 1. The middle stamp in the strip of three is overprinted “War Stamp.”

Turns out I had it wrong. Several readers sent an excerpt from a Mystic Stamp Company monograph titled The Grinnell Missionaries: Genuine Stamp Rarities or Clever Fakes Created to Cheat Collectors? by Ken Lawrence, a well-known philatelic expert and Linn’s writer. In that article, Lawrence introduces us to Charles Sidney Thompson who was involved in the Grinnell story, and he quotes a letter that Thompson wrote explaining the overprints:

“Being a Canadian, of course, I have been vitally interested in the war from the first and felt rather impatient that the United States did not get in it sooner. Then Mr. [President] Wilson finally decided, and revenue measures were being discussed. I decided to see if I couldn’t stir up a bit of interest in an increased postage rate. In order to draw immediate attention, I decided that the best way to do it would be to violate a long-established precedent that United States postage stamps should not be surcharged.

“Therefore I bought a thousand 1¢ stamps, and after discussing the matter with our printer, who is an Englishman, we decided that we would overprint them in blocks of ten, 2 high and 5 wide. Owing to the fact that we possessed but little type of a font sufficiently striking to suit the purpose, it was necessary to use sans-serif type of three different sizes (but all the same stye) to do the work.

“This was done in an exceedingly careful manner, many trial impressions being taken on paper in order to get an overprint that would be clear and brilliant. When it came to printing the stamps, the press was turned by hand slowly, instead of using the motor, with the result that our home-made surcharge is executed much better than some produced in Government Offices.”

Lawrence notes that Thompson began using them on May 3, 1917 [later corrected to May 2], and was careful to add correct postage in the form of ordinary stamps on mail from the Southwest Museum, where the overprints had been produced.

The original printing had 12 stars, but a second printing used the same words and 13 stars. The overprinted stamps were se-tenant between plain stamps without overprints, like those shown in Figure 1 and on ...

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