The Manufacturing Of Graded 100 "Gems"

I've been seeing sellers do more of this lately and wanted to see others opinions on this practice. It involves wasting a few imperfs to get the center stamp graded at 100.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/US-576-1-Ha...em35dd553ac3

I personally think that it waters down the "100" grade which should be the equivalent of a 1 in a million stamp, but anyone can do this to a block of imperfs and I'm surprised that someone would grade it
(ok, I'm not surprised that PSE would take the money and run)

I consider this to be a block of 9 with eight damaged stamps and one sound stamp in the center. However, like the irrational prejudice against the natural straight edge variety which should not be called as a fault, the marketplace will determine the ultimate value.

Clark

I agree with both of the first two posts. It's pretty much a joke, but you can hardly fault the seller if someone is willing to pay a ridiculous premium for such an artificial creation. On a less serious note, I would never buy it because it's way too big for the space in my album.

Don't give these marketeers any ideas or they'll soon come up with a special album just to display their "Gem 100" rarities!

This has been going on for some time. Collectors always sought them. Only now we have someone "expertly" grading them.

Stamp dealer J Hull Wilson of Pittsburgh, cut up imperforate sheets in the early 1900s to create large margin blocks. Most commonly on Scott #532. Once the sheets were seperated the remainders were privately perforated, what is now known as Wilson roulettes.

Here's a Wilson roulette. Notice the missing margins.

Speaking of roulettes... given they are the easiest
items to fake, the expertizing entities should set
a policy to (never) expertize them...

The ebay item posted by the OP just closed--no one bid on it.

Even PSE now agrees that a block like that in the top post is a nice single surrounded by 8 damaged stamps - they will only give a grade now if the margins are not so huge (I think no more than a quarter of the adjacent stamp) Personally, I like my jumbo imperfs to just come to the edge of the adjacent stamp so they fit in my mount :-)

While it is true that rouletted stamps are easy to fake, most of the recognized earlier private roulettes are well-documented and differ from each other such that expert services are able to differentiate them and thus accurately identify them. Sometimes, however, we are presented with roulettes of unknown origin that are not any of the well-documented ones and in those cases we certify them as genuine private roulettes of unknown origin. And as such, they are not nearly as desirable as those that are well-documented, but some collectors still want them anyway - particularly if genuinely used on cover.

That's very interesting! When I think roulette's I immediately think "the battleships".

I saw one such artificial jumbo only get a 98J instead of a 100J. Found it quite amusing.

eyeonwall, a common reason for that happening is that there's a minor problem with the stamp -- very light gum bend, tiny inclusion, fingerprint, etc. Not bad enough to specifically call out, but enough to knock the numeric grade down a notch.