APS “Black Blot” Program: The Long and the Short of It with a Takeaway

Have you attended a Great American Stamp Show (GASS), an annual event sponsored by the American Philatelic Society (APS)? If not, you owe it to yourself to go to one because they are fantastic!

I must warn you, however, that today’s GASS (probably) won’t include wandering accordion players and singing stamp collectors as was the case for the APS’s 1954 convention held in San Francisco (Figure 1). Those were the days, right? Well, I have no idea – that was before my time – but certainly APS conventions in those days not only showcased dealers and exhibits and included a fair amount of frivolity but entailed conducting official society business. 

Figure 1 – A snapshot from the APS convention in San Francisco, September 15-17, 1954. Source: The American Philatelist, November 1964, p. 103.

A hot topic at the 1954 convention was the printing and sale of “labels purporting to be postage stamps of duly constituted political entities” like Free Croatia, Free Albania and South Moluccas (or Maluku). (Look those up on Wikipedia and stump your friends at your next trivia contest.) These labels had no postal or philatelic value and were printed by private individuals with the aim of separating uninformed stamp collectors from their hard-earned money.

The APS was outraged and looked to stop this abusive practice. The society’s leadership adopted a resolution at the 1954 convention that condemned the printing and sale of such labels; committed to disciplining any member who produced and/or sold such labels misrepresenting them as legitimate postage stamps; established a “watchdog” committee that would keep tabs on the production of new labels; and ordered the editor of The American Philatelist (AP) “to print as promptly as possible all information that he [sic] receives which will readily identify such labels to our members.”

Thus began what would become known in 1962 as the “Black Blot Program” administered by the APS’s “Watchdog Committee” (Figure 2). What started off as a well-meaning attempt to protect stamp collectors became a controversial program seen by some as an attempt by the APS – or the “philatelic elites” – to tell collectors what they should and should not collect.

Figure 2 – Cover of The American Philatelist, April 1962, announcing the “Black Blot” program. The color is original.

The “black blot” program petered out in the early 1980s, but references to it pop up every now and again. While the program may have been controversial, the basic message of “buyer beware” is still an important one.

A Long History

For as long as there has been a hobby called “stamp collecting,” there have been opinions about what to collect, the legitimacy of certain stamp issues, and the risk of collectors being ripped off by unscrupulous players.

Consider the United States’s Columbian Exposition Issue of 1893. Celebrating the 400th anniversary of the “discovery” of America by Christopher Columbus, the 16 stamps in that series were the first commemoratives issued by the United States (Figure 3). For U.S. stamp collectors today, that is a much-desired series, with the $1 to $5 denominations having catalogue values in the hundreds of dollars.

Figure 3 – The 2-cent denomination from the Columbian Exposition Issue of 1893. Almost 1.5 billion of this stamp were printed, and it is by far the most affordable for collectors.

 But it was far from a beloved series at the time. Railroad mail clerks complained that the 1-cent denomination looked too much like the 10-cent special delivery stamp of the day. Others complained that the stamp was too large with one physician opining that if “the sale of those stamps were stopped the stamps might be used for chest protectors.” There were even complaints about the amount of saliva needed to stick the stamps to envelopes with this joke making the rounds:

            “In Casey’s saloon you get a Columbia [sic] stamp with a glass of beer.”

            “What’s the idea of that?”

            “Well, after you’ve licked the stamps, you are so dry you need two more glasses!”

 A more serious complaint – and one that would have resonated at the 1954 APS convention – was lodged in the U.S. Senate by Senator Edward Wolcott of Colorado. A few weeks after the Columbian stamps went on sale, Senator Walcott filed a resolution calling for their sale to stop. He observed that the Postmaster General expected to generate $1.5 million extra profit out of the sale of the stamps to collectors. He said, “That was a trick that might suit some of the little Central American states when they were a few thousand dollars ‘shy,’ but the United States was too big a country to unload a cruel and unusual stamp upon stamp collectors.” His resolution did not pass, and the Columbian stamps remained on sale for all of 1893.

One year later, there was a great hubbub about the proliferation of stamps issued by Portugal and its colonies that resulted in the short-lived “Society for the Suppression of Speculative Stamps.” A writer reflecting on this episode in the AP about a decade later commented, “officials who have guided [Portugal’s] postal affairs may not have been philatelists, yet they understood stamp collectors and knew how to cater to their susceptibilities.” A particular target for the ire was Portugal’s 1894 issue honoring Prince Henry the Navigator. Portugal issued one design but in 13 different denominations (Figure 4)!

Figure 4 – The 5-reis denomination from Portugal’s Prince Henry the Navigator commemorative series of 1894.

 Other countries also were lambasted for issuing what collectors viewed as unnecessary postage. In the Philadelphia Stamp News of November 11, 1910, a columnist by the name of “A. Kitelman” carped about Austria issuing a series of birthday stamps for Emperor Franz Joseph I when “there was no evident need in a postal sense for the issue” and that the powerful Austrian Empire was simply “trading upon the personal popularity of their sovereign to turn an ‘honest’ penny” (Figure 5). 

Figure 5 – 10-krone Austrian stamp celebrating Emperor Frank Joseph I’s 80th birthday issued August 18, 1910. This was the highest denomination of 17 stamps issued and the primary target of Mr. A. Kitelman’s complaint.

Fast forward to January 1939, and you can read in the AP member John N. Myer bemoaning a set of surcharged stamps of Colombia that he bought to complete his collection. He discovered that the stamps were overprinted by a private individual, not by the Colombian postal service, and that they were never valid for postage. To add insult to injury, the stamps were listed in stamp catalogues of the day. He wrote, “If philately is to achieve its place among intellectual pursuits we must develop a new philately that will seek to determine the truth and make vigorous efforts to suppress attempts to foist illicit stamps on collectors.”

A Short History

It was clear that stamp collectors had long been sensitive to being taken advantage of by unscrupulous individuals and savvy postal agencies, but that angst reached a fever pitch in the post-World War II era and was reflected in the action taken at the 1954 convention.

Beginning in the late 1940s, a host of newly independent nations came into being, many of them former British colonies. These entities had issued postage stamps all along, but several became prolific issuers after independence, no doubt with a mind to raising revenue.

Then there were the communist countries behind the Iron Curtain, places like the German Democratic Republic (DDR) or East Germany, that issued stamps like there was no tomorrow (Figure 6). These stamps were often issued “canceled to order” meaning they were neatly postmarked before they were sold. That way, the DDR – as well as other countries – could produce a plethora of inexpensive stamps and collect revenue from collectors without having to worry about the stamps being used on postal items. 

Figure 6 – Black blotted East German stamps. Top: 1965 stamp commemorating Alexei Leonov’s first ever spacewalk. Bottom: 1967 horse-themed stamp. East Germany issued 98 and 123 stamps in 1965 and 1967, respectively. By way of comparison, the United States issued 17 commemoratives in 1965 and 15 in 1967.

The APS had a point that these stamps were of questionable postal need, and it was plain that countries were tapping into the pocketbooks of collectors, especially topical collectors who jumped at the opportunity to add a spaceflight- or animal-themed stamp to their collections.

The APS’s Watchdog Committee issued a handful of reports to APS members in the late 1950s and really hit its stride when it issued its first “Black Blot” listing in that April 1962 issue of the AP with the bright red cover. The handful of volunteers who served on the Watchdog Committee – renamed the “New Issues Committee” in 1966 – would pore over new issues from around the globe and decide whether to give an issue the “black blot” or the “Big Q,” a short-lived designation of an issue that could lend itself to speculation.

The “black blot” designation had teeth since catalogue publishers like Scott’s would not assign catalog numbers or values to black blotted issues and would instead list them in a “For the Record” column. Black blotted stamps could be exhibited, but Writers Unit 30, an affiliate of the APS, required a pledge of support to the black blot program as a condition of membership.

On the surface, the criteria the committee used appeared straightforward. A stamp or a set of stamps could receive a “black blot” if it had a limited printing or a limited “on sale” time in the country of origin; there was an excessive number of stamps in a series; a series included stamps with unwarranted high values; the stamp had no direct relationship to the issuing country; and/or oddities were intentionally included in the issue, like an imperforate variety. As time went on, these criteria were tweaked to include an item with an obvious lack of postal need; a country’s marketing practices or stamp issuing policies on a trend basis that ultimately worked to the detriment of the hobby; and all souvenir sheets except those to honor an international philatelic exhibition by the host nation.

As they say, the “devil is in the details,” and that was certainly the case as the committee applied these criteria. By the 1970s, it was clear that if strictly applied, virtually every stamp issue – including those of the United States (Figure 7) – would be black blotted by the APS. That was when the committee started to give black blots to what it considered flagrant violators of the criteria. At that point, the criteria were not really objective, just guidelines for a committee to make a subjective decision.

Figure 7 – Two U.S. issues black blotted by the APS. Top: One of ten stamps issued in 1973 to recognize postal service employees. Bottom: 1976 Bicentennial Souvenir Sheet commemorating Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown. The APS decision to black blot the bicentennial souvenir sheets was reported by The New York Times in its April 18, 1976, edition.

By the late 1970s, the black blot program had generated a fair amount of controversy. The APS published a booklet in July 1978 titled, Black Blot 1962-1977: The First Years of an APS Education Program (Figure 8). This 28-page booklet listed every stamp black blotted by the APS and offered a vigorous defense of the program against criticism from postal agencies, the philatelic press, and individual collectors. 

Figure 8 – Cover of the APS’s 1978 publication, Black Blot 1962-1977: The First Years of an APS Education Program.

It seems clear the APS was most stung by criticism from collectors, the very people the program professed to be protecting, or educating to use the APS’s spin. The booklet noted that letters from collectors fell into natural categories:

Those whose arguments contend that we are trying to dictate the collecting habits of individuals; those who believe the program is bad public relations for the APS; those, most unfortunately, who believe that the stamp market should remain one of “buyer beware”; those who write notes of thanks for the service; those who give suggestions for additional issues to cite; and those who would like a complete listing of issues Black Blotted over the years.

It was the first category – “that we are trying to dictate the collecting habits of individuals” – that the booklet repeatedly argued was not the case. Indeed, every other page of the booklet included this disclaimer:

The American Philatelic Society has never told a collector what to collect or how much he should spend on his collection. However, today’s new issues of the world should be considered carefully if future financial disappointment is to be avoided.

The fact that the booklet repeats this statement eight times and denies in the introduction that the APS is trying to dictate collecting interests brings to mind the line in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

The APS also came across as condescending. In one issue of the AP, the editor, who was a member of the New Issues Committee, described governments that abused stamp-issuing practices defined by the “black blot” criteria as “jackals feeding on the carcass of our hobby’s prestige.” The APS noted that some collectors were trying to amass all the issues on the APS’s black blot list and challenged those individuals instead to “try to collect Black Blotted material that is postally used on commercial covers.”

In its 1978 publication, the APS acknowledged that “there may be changes in the Black Blot program as it now is constituted, for there is no reason to believe that it will always be needed, or that it will always serve philately best in its current format.”

Less than four years later – January 1982 to be exact (Figure 9) – the AP included its final “black blot” listing. Two months later, the editor of the AP defended why the committee did not black blot the U.S. Postal Service’s (USPS) “State Birds and Flowers” issue, a sheet of 50 different stamps, even though that issue seemed to blatantly violate the committee’s criteria as pointed out by some members. In October 1982, the AP editor seemed to declare victory, opining in an editorial that while the New Issues Committee continued to review stamp emissions, there had been “no noticeable increase in the items to be cited with the Black Blot” and “in the recent past no items have been cited at all.” He concluded “the Committee continues its work on a regular basis. When there is something to report, it will be so noted in The American Philatelist.” Not a single listing subsequently appeared.

Figure 9 – Final Black Blot listing, The American Philatelist, January 1982, p. 65.

Takeaway

To paraphrase T.S. Eliot from The Hollow Men, the black blot program went out with a whimper, not a bang. The New Issues Committee reportedly was disbanded in the early 1990s. There is the occasional letter to the AP editor – one as recently as 2022 - suggesting it be restarted because of some stamp issued by the USPS, but the “black blot” program seems to have fallen into that “been there, done that” category.

The “black blot” program was well intentioned. Its aim of helping collectors spend their dollars thoughtfully was admirable. There was an information gap that the program tried to fill.

On the other hand, the process was strident and the language condescending. Early on, stamps that were black blotted were called “modern album weeds,” harkening back to a seminal work by R.B. Eareé in the 1880s on stamp forgeries. I’m sure that comparison was used to make a point, but there seems to be a big difference between a forgery and a stamp issue of dubious postal value. No one likes to be told that the souvenir sheet celebrating the 200th anniversary of American independence they bought is a “weed.”

I think the “black blot” program was based on a faulty assumption, namely that collectors collected solely for future financial reward. After all, the program was based on the notion of helping collectors avoid “future financial disappointment.” But if you were collecting purely for the joy of having a complete set of horse-themed stamps and you never expected to get rich as a result, what was the harm?

Stamp collecting is, first and foremost, a hobby. You should be a collector because it’s fun and it brings you joy. If you consider it an investment akin to buying stocks, bonds, and rare art, then by all means pay very close attention to how you deploy your funds. In that case, it’s most definitely a case of “buyer beware.”

Now make plans to attend GASS or another stamp show and have fun! And be sure to keep an eye out for a roaming accordion player.