France - Napoleon 1860, Maury #14ii - With Unlisted Fond Ligne Variety

@Renden - I understand you find one catalog sufficient - probably Maury should be sufficient for me as well, and as you say, with help from the color charts



Send me images of your 'old Frenchmen' and I might have a few duplicates to share.

perf12 - thank you for the link, very useful indeed! As far as I could tell my stamp passed the 5 check points.

Interesting with the 'fabricated' tete-beche pair you showed us I guess the upright is compared to the inverted, with a horizontal line across, to indicate some proportions being wrong? Or something else? What are the marks to look for?

I did similar 'tete-beche exercise' as you did, using the stamps in your post I understand is genuine (your own stamps?) - and my own stamp as well:




It seems like none of them match 100%. But in my opinion the general trend is that the tete-beche of the forgery you showed us seems to have less portion of the neck above the horizontal reference line on the inverted stamp.
But this is just me playing, trying to understand what to look for!

Any lead - or comments

....btw - forgot to say - the 1 fr Napoleon in a block of 4 - that's quite sweet, forgery or not



Thanks, another valid point The Gros points cancel on my stamp seems just as messy, oily and hastily applied as on the cheap 'blues', so it seems its been cancelled in same manner as other postally used stamps, some bleed trough the paper etc.

The Block is the real stamps.I don't have no.18 so I want too verify
everything before I buy one.There are only a few reputable dealers
around that offer the original stamp in good condition.Lot's of things
too watch out for as you know.
Blaamand: Nice workshop job with the stamps.When you have time post a nice clear pic front & back of your stamp.Need pic of the ear!
Real ears:

perf12 - thanks, but I do not know exactly how I can use the result!? I am hoping for you to reveal your secret for how to make any meaningful conclusion out of the teche-beche experiments ?

Regarding better scan - unfortunately I'll be away from home another 6 weeks, and I only have a poor photocopy/scanner available where I am right now (at work offshore)
But you can have a look at a similar poor image quality off the back:


- and a new scan of the front after a soak for removing hinge remnants ...



With a good lens I can see the details in the ear looks identical to the images perf12 posted above. And I can see ..... evidence that the stamp technically is in spacefiller quality anyway; a thin on the reverse, a crease and narrow margins...but for now it fills an otherwise empty space in my album