Offer To Help Identify German States ...

I will be spending a few hours at my club's philatelic library this Saturday doing research on German States using their copies of the German Philatelic Society's books on forgeries. (A twice monthly occurrence).

I am extending an offer to help with the identification and authentication of your stamps as both a means to serve this community, and to increase my knowledge of the subject. If you have items you wish to have looked at, please post high quality images to this thread and I will do my best to help out.

Please do not ask for help on colors/shades ... I am colorblind and won't be of much use.

Offer is limited to 2 stamps each (don't post your entire collection )

Cheers!

Brian

Very kind of you. I should have picked some up at the stamp club last night

thank you rileysan

*Bump*. 3 more days to get your requests in!

Hi Rileysan,

It is very kind of you to offer your time to help out your fellow collectors here on SCF! I have attached a couple Baden stamps for you to have a look at with the hopes of learning a bit more about them myself, along with giving you some other material to learn with. If you would like additional scans of these stamps, or if you are looking for a particular stamp design that interests you the most, let me know. I would be happy to root around and try and find something up your alley!





Thanks again and Have Fun!

Skilo54

The scans look great. The second stamp is one I mentioned in another thread that requires the counting of shading lines as a means of authentication. I did about 40 of these in one day so I'm getting pretty good at it :)

I'm expecting a small lot of Saxony in the next day or so. I'll see if there is anything interesting. (I'm not too familiar with spotting features for Saxony.)

Nice scans, skilo. Are you thinking the cancel numbers are "79" and "87"? On the odd chance those are right, 79 is Lahr, and 87 is Mannheim. I also considered "28" for the 9kr (which would be Durlach).

They would be welcome, cjd!

Thanks for the compliments on the scans guys, glad to be able to add to the study material! I have a bunch more German State stamps if you would ever be interested in having a look. I would be happy to email or post some scans for your reference/comparison.

In response to the postmarks, I really haven't paid much mind to them until you pointed them out Cjd. In my opinion your observations are correct regarding the '79' and the '87' from what I can gather. I appreciate the information about them and would like to ask if these are common numbers or a little more collectible? I would also like to ask what reference you are using to determine the origins of the numbers. I would like to add a small note on my German State pages about this reference so when the time comes I know what to buy!

If either of you ever have any questions regarding the 4 British Kings I would be glad to help where I can, please feel free to drop a line!

Take care,
Skilo54

There was another Baden thread here a while back that showed the secret mark on one of the other values in this series. (The secret marks move around just a bit.) For the archives, the secret mark on this 3kr value, above, is here:




It is the little protuberance on the otherwise uniform scalloping.

The small "5" in 1850 and the capital "F" that doesn't touch the frame are still spotting features of genuine stamps that do carry over across more than one value.

The presence of all 3 is still no guarantee of genuineness, but the absence of any one or more should confirm a fake.

(I'm far from an expert on this German stuff, so if anyone sees a flaw in this, please, point it out.)

As for the post office numbers, I don't have a rarity guide, so I would base my personal guesses on relative populations of the towns (making my guesses completely unreliable for valuation purposes).