Tasmania - Help To ID This Stamp Needed

Let's see your Travancore - Rod222 will be in eighth or ninth heaven.

A kiss print occurs when a sheet flaps back against the printing plate, or in offset litho (more properly, a 'blanket offset'), the blanket flaps back against the paper, producing a slight doubling of the impression. It often gives the appearance of the stamp being rather blurred. Gibbons doesn't list them as true double prints, although some kiss prints on Australian 'Roos have fetched very fancy (five and six-figure) prices. In the Indian States, and Jaipur particularly, they're pretty ho-hum: might get you 2 cents for one instead of 1 cent.

OK, one of my Maharaja portrait types is possibly a kiss print, then. It has an intense colouration that is obviously different from the regular issue. It might have produced by this manner, although I'm not sure there's any visible doubling.

The ½ Anna value was produced in very large numbers. You do find a bit of variation between printings, but you can also find the odd kiss print as well. It can be hard to tell the difference sometimes, particularly if the kiss print coincided closely enough with the first print.

Here's the Travancore stamp in question: it's just a Service stamp, but I recall not being able to find a 1 1/2 ch. in this colour.



That said, it doesn't mean it wasn't there. My brain was fairly addled after doing Cochin Achal, Travancore, and Jaipur yesterday. By the end, I probably wasn't capable of distinguishing a maharajah from an elephant.

Travancore is a bit of a maze. Your stamp is SG O97 (or b, c or d depending on the perf gauge; probably O97b, from the look of it).

Thanks for the ID, tonymacg. I would have described this as 'rose,' not scarlet, which is how this item is listed in Gibbons. My concept of 'scarlet' seems to have taken quite a beating in the last couple of days!

If you have a Gibbons Colour Key, always remember to compare areas of solid colour (if you can find them) with the colour key patch. That said, I don't always agree with Gibbons colour descriptions, particularly of the reds. That may be a problem of my colour perception, or of fading/discolouration over time, or both, of course.