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Message:: [QUOTE="gsalexan, post: 1157322, member: 24274"]More follow-up on this topic. I came across some source material from an 1890 story in "Press and Angels American," a weekly paper published in Trenton, New Jersey. According to Edward Sterling (pictured), by the late 1880s obsolete tax stamps had piled up to such an extent that the U.S. Department of the Treasury was running out of room to store them. Stacks of stamps in bound books returned by tax collectors occupied every corridor on the 4th floor of the Treasury Building, along with nine rooms and the basement of the nearby Winder Building, then used by Treasury—some 4,000 cubic feet. An act of Congress authorized the sale of this surplus material and Deats and Sterling were the successful bidders on the entire accumulation. They received seven train boxcars full of paper weighing more than 200 tons. "We bought them chiefly as historical records," said Sterling. "We now have the stubs of every revenue stamp issued in the United States from No. 1 in 1863 to many thousands in 1885."  They eventually identified more than 500 varieties of stamps, some valued at up to $4,000! I'm also attaching an advertisement they printed on the back of a Distillery Warehouse taxpaid stamp for the 1891 Great Inter-State Fair in Trenton. Deats & Sterling printed 50,000 of these to give away as samples.[/QUOTE]