The most Christmas seals we’ve ever seen on one cover

By John M. Hotchner

We have a new champion in the category of most Christmas seals on a single cover. In the U.S. Stamp Notes column in the Feb. 1, 2016, issue of Linn’s, the claimant was a 1919 cover with 12 tied 1919 Christmas seals.

In that column, I challenged Linn’s readers to better that record. The response was excellent.

George Miura found a 1942 cover on eBay with 18 seals.

Connect with Linn’s Stamp News: 

    Sign up for our newsletter
    Like us on Facebook
    Follow us on Twitter

A cover I discovered in the stock of seal specialist dealer Denny Peoples has 22 1919 seals on the back.

I figured that 1919 cover would be hard to beat, but a new champion has been crowned, courtesy of another seal specialist dealer, Joe Ward. The new champion has 26 1935 seals.

That cover had been in the collection of Dick Green, an early collector of Christmas seals and founder of the Green’s Catalog of the Tuberculosis Seals of the World, first issued in 1930 and now a continuing publication of the Christmas Seal and Charity Stamp Society.

The 1935 Christmas seals on the cover are the version printed by the Columbian Bank Note Co., one of four companies employed to produce the tens of millions of seals needed for nationwide distribution.

The seal in the lower-right corner of the cover is key to this identification. It has a small horizontal black line in the margin, a flaw unique to the Columbian-printed seals.

If anyone can beat 26 Christmas seals on a single cover, I would be delighted to hear from you. Please contact me, John Hotchner, by email at jmhstamp@verizon.net, or by mail at Box 1125, Falls Church, VA 22041-0125.