Sometimes it's just about the hunt for a stamp. And sometimes you get lucky!

I was just enjoying a Sunday morning, listening to Chopin and sorting through a whole lot of stamps.

And you often see things like this. A whole bunch of glassine envelopes with the same stamp in it. People often collect in this manor -keeping stamps organized into groups of the same.

But there was a glassine with a whole bunch of the 2 cent Columbians. And I thought that it would be fun to go through them on the off chance there was a "broken hat" variation.

So I broke out the magnifying glass and inspected each one.

And sure enough, there was one! And, as a matter of fact there were two!

If you are not familiar with this stamp aberration we can take a closer look. A printing error caused a distinct break in one of the figures hats. The arrow shows where it is. It is pretty pronounced and we will take a look at a normal one so you can see the difference.

Here is a normal 2 cent columbian without the broken hat. These are much more common.

So, I have a couple of thoughts about this.

With stamp collecting it is sometimes just about the thrill of the hunt. It isn't the same thrill you get from skydiving! But, I did have a wonderful little feeling when sorting through these stamps I found a broken hat variation - and again when I found a second one!

About the value of these stamps

This variation (stamp error) isn't particularly valuable. They did print a whole lot of them with this mistake. For the used variation like I have they are worth two or three dollars. A mint version is typically worth around a hundred dollars.
Whereas the common Scott 231 with the unbroken hat is exceedingly more common and a used version is worth about twenty five cents and the mint version around twenty dollars.

The value doesn't matter much to me. It was the fun of the hunt and the joy of the find that was great; and remains one of the best things about stamp collecting.

I proudly added these two broken hat stamps to my album.

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