Please Help. Mold? Mildew? Foxing?...

This stamps shows many signs of I don't know what. It could be a good clinic for stamp diseases. What are we looking at here? And does anyone think it has been re-perfed?







And is it just me or is it re-perfed on the top, bottom, and right side?


-IBFS

The front view with the arrows you added, those perfs have the look of a re-gummed stamp. Don't think that's the case here.

Cleaned cancel perhaps? Remanent of old one?

IBFS....
the area above the "T" in postage.....looks to be a thin.
The mark on the front is the same as the back.
Since this stamp has no gum I see no harm in
"giving it a bath". This might help clean up the edges....
cant hurt.

Yup a thin! I think you nailed it.

You can try placing the stamp inside a small container elevated on top of a small cup with a cotton ball soaked in peroxide at the bottom. It cleaned up my stamp very well with no unwanted effects.

You can check an earlier thread here: https://goscf.com/t/40403

Check out the before and after results I posted.

Don

IBFS, Greetings:

I am, happily, an innocent in most of these matters, but:

The two darker areas in the upper right of the face suggest, perhaps, the 6 o'clock to 8 o'clock arc of a cds.

Q/ Viewed at an acute angle, under abusive magnification, does the blackish color appear more down in the paper (cancel coming through) or more along the surface (mold)?

The brownish areas on the reverse are largely contiguous. In my experience, foxing tends to be visibly intermittent ... take special note the 'my' and 'tends' ... so my thought is 'hinge remain stain'. Similarly, that the brownish area is largely in the upper half of the stamp suggests 'hinge remain stain'.

Q/ Viewed at an acute angle, under abusive magnification, does the brownish color appear more down in the paper (foxing) or more along the surface (hinge)?

Q/ Viewed orthogonally, under abusive magnification, does the brownish color appear to have formed/grown one molecule (okay, droplet) at a time (foxing) or is it, at the micro level, more of a continuous shmear (as from a hinge)?

Applying a straight edge to your scan - creating a common chord, as it were - the perfs appear remarkably straight for a re-perf.

I suggest very high (eg 2400 dpi) scans of the four corners. Measure the PD2D (Perf Distance To Design) by moving your cursor and taking careful & copious notes of the XY positions.

The PD2D for the first & last perfs in any row, along with the distance between them, will give you a fair measure of the skew of the perfs versus the design.

Someone who knows more than me (easy to find) might offer more about the degree of skew common to that stamp (on that press, in those days, etc).

I see that some of the perfs show the tell-tale extended filaments of stamps torn from other stamps, but not all do. Some, in fact, have that nice clean edge suggestive of re-gumming. I will not pretend to have seen enough samples to allow me to form an opinion, let alone a useful opinion, but you might enjoy reading more at:

http://johnapfelbaum.blogspot.com/2...nal-gum.html

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

Actually I don't have the stamp and was considering buying it. The seller has priced the stamp at $120.00. I was going to make a best offer, but I think it would offend the seller. Besides...some poor soul will buy that stamp for the price listed and the seller knows it.

My main worries were mildew, and whether or not it was re-perfed. I wouldn't have wanted it for my collection with either of these issues in any event.

It might be my old eyes, but it looks to me like the perfs on the right side are curved outward, like a right parentheses [ ) ]. And what concerned me about the slanted top and bottom perfs was how straight the perfs are on the left side.

Hmmm...(?).


-IBFS

IBFS....seller is a "lurker" here.
A email to him would solve/answer most problems....
He is a nice guy!

I think I would wait and find a more desirable stamp to add to your collection. If you bought it, every time you looked at it, you would have questions and concerns...so even at a good price its still not exactly what you would want.
Just my opinion.

G-d Bless Your Old Eyes, but some of the perf 'arms' are longer, and some are shorter, and your eyeballs - regardless of age & agility - are gonna get dragged, kicking & screaming, to see a curve.

Applying a straight edge to my screen - clipping all of the perf 'arms', as it were - makes them look fairly straight to me, but a High Res scan beats a Mark One Eyeball, time & again.

My browser (Opera) has a simple, small scroll bar for zooming - no clicking to open a menu, etc - so I enlarged the scans and broke-out my trusty ACMoore see-thru little ruler and, well, maybe your old eyes ain't so old after all.

The PD2D (better abbreviated as P2DD, now that I think about it) came to 11 screen millimeters on right-side perfs nearer the corners, and 12 screen millimeters on the right-side perfs at, well, nose level.

I have no idea if that is an acceptable variation for that stamp (on that press, at that time), but it ain't no optical illusion.

I also have no idea if the asphericity of the perf holes is conclusive; on the one hand, perfs created by machine (high speed, high pressure) would be expected to be more often more perfectly round, while perfs created by hand (slower speed, less pressure) would offer more opportunity for the paper to stretch during the puncture/cut.

But how often were perf holes less-than-spherical on that press, at that time? Like Johnny Five said: 'need more input'; in this case, more experience looking at more samples of that stamp.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

Yes, I agree. I've decided to wait for my Tax Refund and blow a wad of it on a nice one.


-IBFS