Album Pages or Stock Pages/Books

A blog post after a long time. I have been posting mostly on my Instagram account.

I have always used stock books/pages. After restarting my hobby I am discovering printed album pages and loving it. They just help organize the collection a lot better. While stock books and pages have the ease of moving thing around, somehow I like the charm of well organized album pages.

Here are a few pages from Austria album. Nothing out of the ordinary in terms of stamps I have, but so much better organized, don't you think.

#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.