1800's Local Stamps

Hello everyone. I am new to this forum, and stamps for that matter, and need help with a recent purchase. I bought a load of stuff from a very wealthy estate. These pages were included. It looks like they are valuable, if real. Does anyone here have any thoughts? All help is greatly appreciated. I did look at these with a loupe, as I would with baseball cards, and found no dot matrix. I'm not sure if that is a tell tale sign, but it works for vintage cards. Thanks for any help that may come my way!

Since I know nothing about "locals" I will tread lightly in the hopes someone else chimes in.

I did read that US locals were produced in 1842-1860 and that reprints & forgeries are rife. Also that used may have a better chance at being real than unused. And that the very early produced reprints & forgeries can have some value.

These do not look very old as in all modern perfect reprints.

Not all are locals, there are two postmaster's provisionals on the first page from Providence R.I. However the odds on any of these being genuine rather than reprints is very small. A few like the Boyds on the second page might be genuine, unused examples of some of them are very common.

I believe these are all reprints/facsimiles due to the condition and vividness of the colors...I don't mean to rain on your parade but that could be the case.

Yeah, the ink and paper colors on many look too saturated.

U.S. locals is an absolute minefield of reprints and forgeries. In some cases individual stamps were reprinted and/or faked by numerous different entities on different occasions, many of them contemporaneously, so age is not a determiner of authenticity. When determining value, it's not just whether an item is a reprint or fake, but WHICH reprint or fake it is...

The minute details of determining legit from non are staggering. I purchased the 3-volume "The Identifier for Carriers, Locals, Fakes, Forgeries and Bogus Posts of the US" by Larry Lyons (1998), and the level of scrutiny and number of details made my head explode.

It is NOT a field for casual or cursory collecting (think Persia on steroids) unless you want to be content with collecting everything as reprints and paying as such.

Seriously... the level of detail and analysis required scares the hell out of me.

It is hard to tell for sure without a larger scan, but the vast majority appear to be S. Allen Taylor fakes (counterfeit printings of real carrier and local post stamps, confederate postmaster provisionals, and sanitary fair stamps) and bogus issues (fantasy stamps that do not imitate a genuine stamp). The S. Allen Taylor fakes and bogus stamps were printed in the early days of stamp collecting in the late 1800s, and are collectible. They would probably bring around $3 per stamp in a bulk lot, some scarcer color / paper varieties could sell for more individually.

Thanks to all for the info. Wasn't what I had hoped, but what I figured they would be.

Most look like reprints, but they are very collectable. Go to the carriers & locals web page to find out more. You can even download pages for an album.