There’s an eBay lot that I really, really want. The auction closes in less than one hour (4:40 a.m. PDT is probably some sensible time in Johannesburg, where the seller resides), and the bidding is at 14% of my high bid. I would love to get this lot for 14% of my high bid.
I can’t sleep, as you can probably tell, so I’ve been fiddling (they call it a “one tweak loop” in computerese) with the sidebar. Let me know what you think — if you can tell the difference.
Firefox did not complain about the word “computerese”. Wow.
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In the last few seconds (predictably) it jumped to 32% of my high bid. I’m still very pleased.
So, did you get it? What was it?
Not to just say “duh“, but yes, if it closed for 32% of my high bid, I won it — for 32% of my high bid!
Early British stamps had “corner letters”. The sheets contained 240 stamps. The rows each had 12 stamps (so a row cost a shilling), and there were 20 of them (so a full sheet cost a pound). In the upper-left of the sheet, the corner letters were “A” and “A”. In the upper-right, they were was “A” and “L”. In the bottom-right, they were “T” and “L” (follow?)
Someone took one issue, an issue I collect, and “virtually” reconstructed a sheet (on stocksheets), assembling an example of all 240 corner-letter-pairs. This is something I’ve been trying to do for a while.
Now, I’m going to do something harder: I’m going to take it apart and figure out exactly which printing plate each came from, exactly what shade each is, and come up with n partial sheets (I won’t know what n is until I get the reference works I borrowed from the APRL). I expect this to take about 80 hours, but to be immensely rewarding.