Certification Help

Hi, I have a bunch of (8-10) stamps that I need to have certified, some I expect may be fake but I need to be sure and others had better be real or I am in trouble One of them is the stamp pictured. I sent some stamps to PSE and they are taking entirely too long especially since I paid for 15 day service. What I need is a way to get a preliminary certification so I can then send the good ones to a well known place like PSE, sort of weed out the bad ones without paying too much money or waiting very long. I also of course need to be sure the stamps are safe, not that you nice folks would steer me in the wrong direction. I live in the Boston area if that helps, having it done while I wait would be great! Thank you
PS if anyone is interested I can email them a better pic of this stamp.

Two ideas/approaches I've had luck with. I regularly the APS expertization service but, they are not quick. But you should be able to get a quick opinion using their "Quick ID" service. Another way I have had great success is to contact the website, forum or otherwise, of the specialty society that would cover the area where you need the opinion. Good luck.

thank you very much cgrotha and at least no one has found fault with this stamp yet!!

With this particular stamp, you might want to do a bit of research on expertising bodies for French stamps. US organisations are fine for expertising US stamps, but I would no more buy a rare Indian States stamp on the basis of a US certificate than I'd stand in the street tearing up $100 notes.

It's a matter of horses for courses: find an accepted French expert for a French stamp, if you plan to sell it.

The surcharge on the C4 you showed looked pretty good at first glance.

I am not an expert in French stamps, but I would say the surcharge is questionable based comparisons between pictures of genuine surcharges to the scan you provided. I have compared your C4 (4.5mm spacing) picture to a C3a (4.5mm spacing, inverted surcharge), C3b (6.5mm spacing), C4 (4.5mm spacing),and C4a (6.5mm spacing).


[EDIT: I forgot, the block above contains both C4 (bottom 2 stamps) and C4a (top 2 stamps). I left the upper left C4a untouched.]

In the upper right C4a(blue), I have overlayed a section of C3b (dull rose). You can see both the letter spacing, inter-bar spacing, and bar length all match.

In the bottom right, I have overlayed sections of your C4. The topmost overlay on that stamp demonstrates that I have scaled your picture properly (note the frame width matches exactly). In the middle overlay, you can see that your "FR." is noticeably closer than normal. Meanwhile, the inter-bar spacing and bar length look OK.

I did the same thing at the bottom left stamp, this time comparing a C3a (4.5mm, dull rose) to the C4 (4.5mm, blue). You can see, the letter spacing is still identical.

My conclusion would be, authenticity of surcharge is questionable based on letter spacing. However, I am not an expert, so an expert might be privy to more information about certain positions on the sheet that have a narrower letter spacing.

I checked that out myself and found all kinds of differences in the surcharges or maybe that was just in the positioning which would always be different I guess. I appreciate your efforts and luckily I am not tied to the stamp. Nice work, I appreciate your effort though I hope you are quite wrong.

There is a fellow in the USA named Bill Weiss. I've seen him on other stamp boards, and know for sure that he does US stamps...not sure about foreign. He seems to have a good reputation and his pricing fits your goals - weeding out or double-checking before getting a "major name" expertizing service to provide certs.

I cannot speak from personal experience with Bill, though, and I do not actually know him.

Peter

Bill is a very good guy, very solid, and always provides a good explanation for his decisions. For any US material, I highly recommend him. His main area of expertise is US, however. Although he does do non-US, I really would go along with the suggestion in a previous post about going to a specialist in France or in Worldwide classics.

Regarding the scans I showed, they are from well-known genuine examples. In all the well-known examples I compared, the letter spacing and the bar spacing matched perfectly. The only differences were in the well-documented 4.5mm and 6.5mm gap varieties.

Again, I am not an expert. Any comparison must be done with well-known or certified examples. Anything else, you may be comparing forgeries to forgeries. If you have scans of other certified copies that have different letter spacing, please post them or provide a link. I would definitely like to learn more about any certified variations.

Rare overprints/surcharges tend to be heavily forged. There is a non-trivial number of forged overprints of this stamp, because the non-overprinted stamp only has a small premium. That is why there is a warning in Scott. So yes, this would definitely be a stamp that would benefit in value if certified.

Best wishes! And thanks for posting the pic! That's definitely a stamp that's missing from my Yvert album!

k