#postmarks365 Project

Inspired by the Postmark calendar post at The Stamp Forum boards, and more importantly, the fact that I bought a couple of Machin kiloware, I am sharing my #postmarks365 project. It's a start and there are still many dates without stamps. While I will try to complete this with Machins only, it is very much possible that I run out of patience and add stamps of other countries too.

Sorry, no April pic because for some reason it didn't come out well and I am too lazy to click again. Will upload sometime later maybe.

Ceylon SG 4 Forgery

A couple of days back I wrote about Ceylon stamp genuine vs forgery that I found in a lot I bought. The catalogue value of the original stamp is GBP 70,000. I asked about the stamp on The Stamp Forum board and falschung, who is an expert on forgeries was kind enough to respond. Here's what he said about the stamp.

First, you stamp slightly enhanced, to the right a genuine SG 4 that sold for $25,000

There is an obvious lack of detail in your stamp especially when you look at the background behind the Queen and the edge decorations.
Many lines & dots are missing in the country and value tablet
The color is too bright and not dull as it should be
Also it is in too good a shape for a 150 year old stamp without the edge blur inking of period stamps

SO, what is it?
Most of the forgeries of this stamp are rather crude and this is not.
Most good forgeries have a watermark impressed with oil & a die.
It is obviously very good and would fool a few people.
So we have some choices

An 1867 SG65a rose/carmine with trimmed perfs as this poor examples that tried to fake an SG4 ??

A cut out from the 1950 London Ex sheet

Or my preferred choice

A Peter Winter Forgery
Note the weak spot in the upper left frame which is the same as yours

Oneglia & Jeffries also made good forgeries
One Oneglia sold at a prestigious action as a genuine

My 2c worth without actually seeing the stamp for watermark & paper

Peter Winter made most of his forgeries in the 1980's
His work may well be the best overall of any forger
Like these gems

He never sold his works as "forgeries" but accurate reproductions mainly under a company called House of Stamps
A "bonvivant", opera singer and artist who reproduced many of the world classics.

Errors in Modern Indian Stamps

When I was young and collecting stamps, I was fascinated by stamp errors. The only 'error' stamps I owned were color variations and those too in used stamps. In my second innings as a collector I have managed to lay my hands on these 'error' stamps. And just when I was feeling kicked about it, fellow collectors tell me these are quite common in modern Indian stamps. Anyway, I am still happy to have these in my collection. Sharing some from my collection here.

Perforation shift Commemorative:

Perforation shift Service stamp:

Imperf definitive pair:

Year printed twice on Commemorative stamp:

Ceylon Genuine vs Forgery

An impulsive buy on an eBay auction has landed me a big lot. It contained mostly stamp varieties from commonwealth countries. Most of the stamps didn't interest me much but I decided to investigate a few that caught my eye. I searched the online catalog StampWorld.com to see if there were stamps that might be of value. I came across the 1859 Ceylon Queen Victoria Four Pence stamp. The catalog listed the unused stamp valued at $ 66,942. I said to myself 'yeah right!'. So I posted it on Facebook group. Promptly I was quoted Stanely Gibbons listing it at GBP 70,000. So had I landed myself a lottery? Wow, I was reveling in wishful thinking that I had landed myself a fortune.

I started searching the Internet about the stamp. My first instinct was this probably was not a real stamp. I came across details about genuine and forged Ceylon Four Pence Rose. The article lists points about genuine and forged stamp. While some of these point to my stamp being a forgery, some points sound like the stamp might be genuine.

It seems I can get my stamp evaluated by The Royal Philatelic Society of London. Let me research more on my own before I spend GBP 810 on getting this stamp evaluated.

Here's the genuine stamp according to Stamp Forgeries website:

And some forgeries from the same site:

1937 Coronation Stamps

I only had a few 1937 Coronation stamps in my collection before I chanced upon and won a very low priced auction of a large lot of these stamps.

In anticipation of that large lot, I started accumalating missing stamps from the collection. I have also started collecting FDCs/Covers of this set.

There are 202 stamps in the series issued by 58 colonies of the British Empire. Interestingly, no stamp was issued in India even though India was a British colony at that time.

Finally my large lot arrived. My collection of 1937 Coronation stamps is now respectable though still far from complete.

Each colony issued three stamps in the set in the list below. There were some exceptions of course, those are listed in parenthesis against the country name in the list below:

• Aden
• Antigua
• Ascension
• Bahamas
• Barbados
• Basutoland
• Bechuanaland
• Bermuda
• British Guiana
• British Honduras
• British Solomon islands
• Canada (1)
• Cayman islands
• Ceylon
• Cook islands
• Cyprus
• Dominica
• Falkland islands
• Fiji
• Gambia
• Gibraltar
• Gilbert and Ellice islands
• Gold coast
• Great Britain (1)
• Grenada
• Hong kong
• Jamaica
• Kenya Uganda and Tanganika
• Leeward Islands
• Malta
• Mauritius
• Monserrat
• Morocco Agencies (3) French Spanish and Tangier)
• Nauru (4)
• Newfoundland
• Newfoundland (11 in extended) 
• New guinea (4)
• New Zealand
• Nigeria
• Niue
• Northern Rhodesia
• Nyasaland
• Papua (4)
• Seychelles
• Sierra Leone
• Somaliland
• South Africa (5 pairs)
• South West Africa (8 Bilingual pairs)
• Southern Rhodesia (4)
• St Christopher and Nevis(St Kitts)
• St Helena
• St Lucia
• St Vincent
• Straits Settlements
• Swaziland
• Trinidad and Tobago
• Turks and Caicos
• Virgin islands

Modern Indian Used Stamps

I visited the Sunday market and met with the local stamp dealer. I asked for new Indian used stamps and he thrusted a large packet of unsorted stamps on paper and asked me to select the stamps I wanted. It was typical kiloware packet. When I asked how much for the whole packet, he refused to quote a price. What he told me was interesting and quite instinctively what I have been suspecting. He said hardly anyone one is posting letters, even fewer people are actually using stamps. Commemorative stamps hardly ever get used and most people have only mint stamps in their collection. And thus he wouldn't sell the whole packet but sell it per stamp. While it was still cheaper than most of what I have seen on eBay, he rather apologitically told me that he is now charging significantly more than what he used to charge earlier. Off-paper stamps were priced slightly higher. I am foreeing it harder to get used Indian stamps. And given the design of the stamps these days, we would soon end up with a market flooded with pictorial stamps that could be mistaken for Cinderallas.

How to Recognize Self-Adhesive Stamps

As you may know from my previous posts, I have been struggling with removing self-adhesive stamps from paper. I finally figured that hot water seems to work the best for me in removing self-adhesive stamps from paper. Having tried my hand at many many Australian stamps, I share with you a way to recognize these self-adhesive stamps on paper so you can be better prepared for them before you soak them in hot water.

Australia releases many variations of stamps. Typically stamps released in miniature sheets seem to be on gum paper, while others are on self-adhesive paper. The perforation of these stamps is an easy way to recognize them.

• Gum stamps usually have finer perforation (14) while self-adhesive stamps have more spread-out wavy perforation (11 or 11½). 
• Check the corners of the stamps. Gum stamps have regular corner perforation while self-adhesive stamps have a more rounded corner with missing perforation in the corner.
• Gum stamps also have pulled effect to perforations, while self-adhesive stamps have neater separation. 

I have noticed the above differences only in Australian stamps. My guess is these might be similar for other countries too like USA, Great Britain etc.

Cheers!

A few of my favourite things... philately, a good dram and photography. And I need to practice my photography more, feeling out of touch, unable to get a good composition and lighting. Hopefully will click some pics that I am really proud of. Until then, cheers folks!

Gutter Pairs

I had written about traffic lights stamps some time back. While I have been collecting those for a while, what's really fascinated me are gutter pairs. According to Wikipedia:

The philatelic ue of the word gutter is the space left between postage stamps which allows them to be separated or perforated. When stamps are printed on large sheets of paper that will be guillotined into smaller sheets along the gutter it will not exist on the finished sheet of stamps. Some sheets are specifically designed where two panes of stamps are separated by a gutter still in the finished sheet and gutters may, or may not, have some printing in the gutter. Since perforation of a particular width of stamps is normal, the gutter between the stamps is often the same size as the postage stamp.

I have always wanted to have gutter pairs in my collection when I was young. Finally I acquired my first gutter pair only recently when I restarted my hobby.

And more recently acquired gutter pairs of these beautiful 1980 Great Britain commemorative stamps.

Maybe some day I'll get gutter block also in my collection.

My next goal is to acquire Tête-bêche. More about that when I get those in my collection.

Removing Self-Adhesive Stamps from Paper

I have tried a few ways to remove self-adhesive stamps now, mostly unsuccessful. But I seem to have found a method that actually works.

I tried lighter fluid as explained in one of the videos I listed in my earlier post on removing stamps from paper. I specially bought Zippo lighter fluid but unfortunately this doesn't work for me. For some reason it seems to make the adhesive stronger and stamps seem to stick stronger to the paper. Maybe it's just a different kind of lighter fluid than what is required.

Another video said to use Citrus spray. Ambipur room freshner was the closest that I could find to this in India. This surprisingly worked a lot better than the lighter fluid. I spray this on the paper wait a few seconds and the paper comes off. However this method also doesn't completely remove paper cleanly. Some paper residue will remain on the stamp. Sometimes the paper does come off completely but the layer of glue remains that you have scrape off which is likely to damage the stamp.

What seems to have worked for me is putting stamps in reasonably hot water (not boiling water). Soak the stamps for a few minutes in hot water and the paper is most likely to come out cleanly. In some cases you may still have to scrape residual paper and glue off the stamp, which is likely to damage the stamp. Be careful and use tweezers in this method as the water and the stamps are hot.

Of course, none of the above methods are completely foolproof. So if you have a stamp that you really want and have only one copy of it, I would advise you to just leave it on paper.

In my search, I also found two commercial label and adhesive remover products. I haven't tried these but if you've have any experience with these, then please do share your experience by leaving a comment.

 

My First Penny Reds

So the Penny Red bug bit me and I outbid others in an eBay auction to acquire my first Penny Reds. I probably ended up paying a little higher than normal price but it didn't feel so bad since these were the first ones I got for my collection. I now have three imperforated 1849 Penny Reds.

The Penny Red was Great Britain's longest running stamp, from February 1841 to the end of November 1879. It was used for the standard letter postage rate of 1d and approximately 21 billion were issued.  Until 1854 the 1d red was imperforate.

The Penny Reds are identified by "plates" and their position on the plate. The bottom row has two characters (top rows have these characters reversed in perforated stamps). The character in left corner represents the row of the stamp on the plate and the right corner character represents the column of the stamp on the plate. So in my stamps shown above, the first stamp was on 19th row and 10th column on the plate. Plate numbers on perforated stamps can be identified with the help of a magnifying glass. The plate number is printed in the side bar design of the stamp. See image below for an example of a stamp from plate number 148 (this is not one of my stamps).

Penny Reds can be as interesting to collect as Machins though probably harder to collect since they are not as easily available as machins.

Some useful links for collecting Penny Reds:

• The Penny Red Collector
• Stanley Gibbons Blog - How to Collect Penny Reds
• Wikipedia - Penny Red

My Machin Album

Since my rediscovery of Machins, I have taken on the task of building an album of machins. To start with, I am trying to complete the basic machins first. Since I had quite a few machins, I thought the task would be easy. Not quite. Turns out I have only 113 stamps out of 494 issued, and this doesn't include variations like phosphor bands etc. So I do have a not so easy task at hand, specially since I have never encountered many of these (e.g. NVI) stamps in India before.

I have printed the basic machin album available free on Great Britain Machins website. My mounts arrived yesterday and I spent my weekend setting up my album. First few pages were easy to fill and then it got harder with high value machins. And my pages are all blank for NVI, double heads and security feature machins.

You can view pages of my album by clicking on the pic below.

My Machin stamp count:

Finding my solace

Stamp collecting has been a therapeutic and comforting hobby. It has kept me awake at night in a good sense. I have lost myself in stamps and that has helped me find myself at the same time. It's amazing how much time I can actually spend on organizing and reorganizing my collection. The only problem is that I have also ended up spending a lot of money. I really gotta find a better way to collect stamps than just spend money.