The American Philatelic Society has a handy-dandy overview of countries whose stamps are frequently misidentified, forged, reprinted, etc., as part of its advice to sellers using their circuit books. I've known about the document for a while, and have been meaning to post a link to this three page pdf.
A few examples:
Australia, 1-76, 113-129, Misidentifications, because watermarks are not noted.
Bolivia, 1–59, Forgeries and fake overprints (40–46 oval cancels with heavy bars are suspect).
United States, Washington/Franklins, Misidentifications, perf. alterations, and regumming.
While a lot of the document is too general to be of much use by itself (for example, watch out for forgeries on the early issues of Trinidad), I still think the list is worth checking out by other general collectors.
The famous stamp collector Josiah Lilly said that there were 100,000 postage stamps he wanted for his collection and he succeeded in acquiring 77,000. My considerably easier target is 35,000 of the more common stamps from 1840-1940 contained in the Scott Blue International Album Volume 1. This blog will record my progress, provide general information about Classic era philately and hopefully encourage other "Blue" collectors.
8 comments:
Bob
Thanks for the link for all the problematic countries/eras that we as Part I collectors have to negotiate.
I put a copy in my Scott Classic specialized catalogue for quick reference.
Bob,
Thanks to you and Jim I feel like I have company on this journey. As I posted on his blog, I purchased the 1997 pages last year and I've started to move over my 1947.
As I started an Excel spreadsheet (three columns: country/number of spaces in Big Blue/number of spaces filled) I realized that you've probably already come up with a spreadsheet for that. Counting 35,000 spaces might not be the best use of my limited collecting time. Has someone already done this in Excel?
Joe
Bob,
This hs been a great blog to read through.
Recently I have been handed down a family collection in Scott International albums parts I, II, and III copyright mid 1950's.
My own mostly european collection is in Yvert Tellier and Schaubek albums and I am trying to understand how to integrate the two.
I have not been able to find a country index for the Scott albums, do you know of a source for that?
Thanks for posting all the interesting info,
Keith
Joe, sorry for the delay in replying. I do have an Excel spreadsheet but I don't believe it would be of much use to anyone else. This is because of the variation between different editions of the Blue and the fact that the pages aren't numbered. More importantly for your question, I never got around to counting the number of spaces for each country. Jim, of course, is doing this on his Blog. FYI, I did a post on my system back in 2008--just type Excel in the Blog search box on the left. If I were doing it over again, I probably would do something like you suggest. Now when Jim gets his checklist done, then there will be more sophisticated possibilities.
Keith, I can provide you with a list of the countries in Volume 1 with the understanding that not all of these are in every volume. I also have incomplete copies of Volumes 2 and 3 but I don't remember if I have the table of contents or not. If I do, I could send you a pdf. I'm getting ready to go out of town for 2 weeks, but I can check when I get back.
Please do send what indexes you have when you get the chance. It would be a great help.Let me know how to send you my email.
Thanks,
Keith
Keith, I suggest sending me your email in a Comment which I won't "approve" for publication. Again, I will be away from my albums until mid-September but will happy to check on this as soon as I can.
Bob,
Thanks for your reply! I'm figuring that my contribution to the conversation is to do an Excel sheet (for the 1997 Big Blue) that simply has country/filled/total spaces. I'll be happy to send it to anyone who wants it. At this point I've just reached the B's, but it may be of interest to people who just want to keep track of how many they have vs. how many spaces there are.
Joe
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