US RD12: Color?

Left is Green (RD12), right is Yellow Green (RD12d). Any comments on the middle? Just a faded green? Thanks in advance.

Looks like it may be just faded - the overprint seems equally faded! Still a pretty color though!

Peter

They issued billions of the basic stamp, which was then overprinted for several different very high volume taxes. Although they are fairly consistent they do have some minor shade variations; after all they were printed for 23 years. Plus they can fade, as mentioned above.

Genuine stamp on the left; philatelic forgery on the right.

The green color was certainly used for printing the $1 documentary stamps at the outset in 1917, but by the 1930's yellow green was the color being used. When it was time to create the silver tax stamps of 1934, the yellow green version was what was used, the left stamp in the image being the genuine RG13. In order to fill those empty spaces in collectors' albums, someone obligingly created some RG13's (?) by taking some of the green $1 documentary stamps and overprinting them, a philatelic forgery, as seen on the right. They even went to some extraordinary lengths to recreate the collector of internal revenue cancellation to make these stamps look authentic. Alas, they only created half a cancel and I have (not illustrated here) an example where the cancel stops before it gets to the edge of the stamps!

Inexplicably, the Scott U.S. Specialized still lists the underlying color of RG13 as green. That should be yellow green.

Ron Lesher

I have seen fake overprints, but never with a fake cancel as well. That cancel should be violet rather than black (at least that is how it appears). As for the Scott listing, since revenues are very far down the list of stamps they consider important, it's no surprise that the shade is wrong.