Royal Wedding 1981 St.kitts Inverted O/P.

A friend of mine emailed me a few stamps and wanted to know if they were some way extra ordinary. So am turning to the experts for advise. This is one of them.It is the royal wedding 1981 of St.Kitts. The o/p official is inverted and the 45c on the left stamp is inverted. Thanks for any input or info.

These are listed in the Gibbons Part I. The 55c stamp is either O25d (£6) or O25gd (also £6), depending on whether the overprint is black or dark blue. The 45c surcharge is either O23fd (£4) or O24fd (£20) depending on the name of the ship shown.

These are 1998 catalog values. Additional copies may have come to light during the auction of the archives of the House of Questa printers, reducing the catalog value; I can't tell which Wedding stamps you have because the images are small and dark.

Thamks Doug2222, since this is stamps were emailed to me, I too am unable to see the name of the yacht.Will get my friend to email me a clearer copy.

There is no yacht on the O24 stamp, only the heads of Charles and Diana (at some length from each other).

22crows, sounds like your reference is better than mine; were these overprinted by House of Questa? They must have printed a lot of "errors" to have such a low price.

These were printed by Format International, who were liquidated in the late 1980's.

Inverts and many other intentional varieties were created for St. Kitts, Tuvalu, etc. They have very little value now.

They have no value to a serious philatelist,this kind of stuff floats around the stamp trade in "dealer lots" and "estate sale lots" .Most dealers look at it as something created by a marketing group to be sold to NEWBIES.It was printed that way on purpose, to be sold as a extra to a topical collector.

Would like to update on this topic. The stamps imaged were not produced by the Format International Security Printers. They were produced by The House of Questa.

The House of Questa produced the majority of the 1981 Royal Wedding Omnibus series under direction of the British Crown Agents. The Format Printers only produced for the imaged series for the country of Sierra Leone which I might add had no errors.

In my studies on the printers it is now a proven fact that the House of Questa did indeed print varieties and errors on a massive scale. They surpassed what the Format Printers produced by a long shot! You can now basically say that all printers and the majority of agencies have and are to this day producing made for collector varieties and errors for the majority of countries.

The only reason the Format Printers continually get brought up in regards to producing these varieties and errors is because of the trials which exposed the documents showing what they were ordered to produce by the agencies. It is standard practice for security printers and the agencies they work under to destroy all documents after a given amount of time...usually when the stamp issue is demonitized. Try to find them and you will see that 99% of all documentation on the printers side no longer exists.

You can view the evidence on this issue and just how massively The House of Questa produced errors and varieties for this issue on my website. Here is the link.

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Valuation of stamp varieties and errors from the early 50's to today needs to be determined on rarity based on what was produced purposely rather than thinking of them in terms of discovery. It is a great possibility that even the famous U.S. Inverted Jenny stamp error was indeed...purposely made.

I have seen far more Format produced "errors" than those from H of Q.

Sorry for the link. Missed the rule. You can Google The House of Questa to get to the page showing examples of the 1981 RW issues and more and then tell me you have seen more errors from Format.
It is on page one.
Also just look in SG specialized catalogs. It is obvious.
Yes Format made a lot of missing color "errors" and such which are mostly unlisted. Questa preferred inverted watermarks and overprint errors among other things. Tons of them. They were in cahoots with SG promotions. Many got listed and many did not. Now if Questa was so legitimate....how come there are bunches of errors produced by them that are not listed? Check out the Royal Caribbean Visit issues.
The example issues are only the tip of the iceberg with Questa.
The page explains it.