Postage Stamp Chat Board & Stamp Bulletin Board Forum
 

An otherwise very common stamp. Shown is a "se-tenant" trio and the imperforate. The imperf has just enough of a second on the right to allow confirmation that this copy is, in fact, an imperforate. True? How much would such a variety be worth?

kwesi

Your single stamp is not an imperforate, it is just a large copy with trimmed perfs. These stamps come horrendously misperforated and when trimmed always confuse their finders, novices and philatelic professionals alike, into thinking that they are imperforates.

I know from my tenure as an expert at The Philatelic Foundation in New York that it will not get a certificate as an imperforate single.

Keep it as a curiosity but commercially it has no real value.

Sorry to be the conveyor of bad news.

Kindest regards

Richard Debney

Thank you, Richard, for your input! I can handle the bad news, but let me ask a couple more questions.

kwesi



You might think so, but, I can assure you, you can get copies fully perforated up to 50% larger than the normal stamp.



Yes, and there is no such thing as a "beginning of a pair," it has to have two complete stamp images to qualify. Its an all or nothing situation.

Kindest regards, Richard

Kwesi, Richard is right. If you look at the top right area,you can see there were perfs.

Thanks again, Richard. Here's an even bigger image...



Now, when you say "copies 50% bigger", are you including everything inside the perfs? That the printed part is the same as any other is irrelevant? So in this case, there was a really botched sheet and someone then trimmed off all of the perfs, creating this particular specimen. There must have been some really "small" specimens on this same sheet.

kwesi

Yes, absolutely.

There are, here in the U.S., what are called "Jumbo" copies. As has always been said, if you can have "Jumbos," then you also have "minis," but nobody markets them as such.

"Jumbos" are frequently found around the edges of a particular sheet, though not in every case.

Kindest regards, Richard

Here are a few specimens of no. 158 (with a scale) showing various sizes and shapes that result from sloppy and inexact perforating. My "imperf" is Row A, position 1. At B2 is what looks like a "jumbo". A1 can fit inside B2, confirming that A1 could have been formed by someone trimming perfs off of a "jumbo". B1 and B3 are tall and thin. Row C has a couple of nice cancels. D1 and D2 have greenish paper, I suppose because the ink ran when soaking or they ran it through the Easter egg dye. The pair at E1 has top perfs that aren't even parallel to the deign. F1 just shows a hint of a second stamp to the right. How far east were those perfs? A few others are scattered through for comparison.

Now let me go and get these out of the Crystal mounts before they get poisoned.

Everything very interesting. I'll keep searching for the "true" ones.

I thought this display would engender some kind of response from experts. Wrong again!

Something else to look for:
The "sheets" of stamps printed were cut down to two "panes" for sale in the post office. There were no perforations between the 10th and 11th columns of the stamps to facilitate cutting. Also to facilitate cutting, an arrow was engraved at the mid-point of the sheet as a guide (it's actually called a "guide arrow").

The left stamp on each of the bottom two rows you post each have remnants of that arrow. Position-wise, the left stamp in the next to last row would be known as "Position 1R." Top left stamp of the right pane of the sheet. The left stamp on the bottom row would be "Position 10L." Top right stamp on the left pane of the sheet. Likewise, the middle stamp on the bottom row would also likely be from the first column of the right pane, next to the cut, but I can't tell what row it would have come from.

If the cutting was a bit off to one side, and if the perforations were off to the other direction, you'll end up with a REALLY big stamp that can include parts of stamps at both sides.

Whether you're talking about a banknote, a stamp from the 1901 series, or anything else, you need to have all of two stamps to have a valid "imperf." The only exception to this rule might be the 5c of the 1901 series, where there are some minute differences in the plates used to print the imperfs and the perfs. Even here, 99.99% of the singles sold as "imperforate" are cut down.

Chip

Thanks, Chip! I'm constantly amazed by the phorensic filately you guys practice!