What Grade Would You Give This Stamp? A Poll

4 & 5 also had the top straightned, didn't they?

In my opinion, leave the crease as in (1) and straighten top left only for appearance.

Don't touch it.
If you want to display it, just frame it.

the crease is a little further into the stamp than you have drawn it

Dude! Leave it as-is and sell it to me (at a massive discount since it has that ugly defect) so you can go in search of the "more perfect" specimen! That stamp is completely awesome as it is--let me know if you want to sell it as I have a blank spot in my collection where it would fit PERFECTLY!

It has excellent eye appeal the way it is, please leave it as original.
Cheers

Ken would not, of course, alter this stamp.

But I would vote for this 'jumbo', rebacked, trimmed, and centered. :)


Don

I don't know. But I like the idea of prompting some more discussion on fixing (manipulating, cleaning, whatever) stamps that you own. I know experts repair art, cars, furniture etc. Some devious persons probably do it to take advantage of less informed people. That is bad and I wish it did not happen but to improve something that you own and plan to keep is another story. Soaking a stamp to remove old hinges, gentle cleaning, pressing the stamp afterwards seem ok to me. Trimming an imperf stamp to make it more visually appealing (better grade) seems like a legitimate thing to do. However, adding backing paper, reperfing, filling holes and those things, without somehow (marking on the stamp?) noting this seem very wrong to me. Another example seen recently was where a block of 9 was destroyed so that the center stamp could be graded as jumbo. That was horrendous imho.

I agree with wkusau's observations. "Gentle cleaning" (where possible at all) seems too sensible to need defending. "Soaking hinges off" typically removes what philatelists, rather than original users, had added to the stamp. As for the rest, maybe a good rule is "only do what the original user might reasonably have done" -- this allows for re-cutting the margin, but not repairing or reperfing.

PSE would grade the stamp, just a question of how much deduction from a max grade for the tiny corner crease. PSE considers a "tiny corner crease" as a Minor Fault. The differences are substantial in pricing.

A 95 stamp would drop to 80, and a 90 grade is reduced to 75. On a US 14 that's a price drop from $350 to $120.

On the plus side, Siegel often offers 14's noting tiny corner creases and does not seem to hurt their pricing.

I would leave as is