Stamps Of Old Mexico..............

Hi!
As I wrote on a previous thread, I am consolidating some Scott "part 1" albums into one, which entails merging a whole lot of stamps.

I'm currently working on Mexico, and am amazed at the number of different stamps they produced - especially in the early part of the 20th century.

Of course that is a good thing, but what bothers me is virtually all my examples (cancelled) are somewhat faded, dingy, and with damaged or worn perfs. I suspect a lot of this is just due to poor paper quality and printing - but that is just a guess.

As these stamps came from 4 different sources, I guess that is a fairly common condition.............

It is what you get with Mexico, complex, yet crude rudimentary production and design.

It may not necessarily be the quality of production. You noted that your stamps came from 4 different sources. It may be how the prior collector collected stamps. Last year, I looked at an old album for a long time friend; it had belonged to his brother when they were kids and he found it in a box in the bottom of a closet. It had several hundred stamps, almost all of them damaged in one way or another, including several that normally would catalog in the circa $50 area. Due to damage, no value.

I bought a bulging old worldwide Schaubeck album at an auction about 10 years ago. It is really a mixed bag as the collector put stamps everywhere, including on the top, side, bottom edges. Naturally many of those got damaged. Lots of good stamps not on the edges, but the collector evidently felt that "a stamp is a stamp," whether it's a good copy or not. There is a lot of "junk" scattered throughout, including damaged copies of what would normally be stamps cataloging in the $100-200 range.