Looks Like A Plate 77 Penny Red To Me...

Sheesh!
I was SO focussed on the scroll work, and the numerals, I thought the second scan was PB's ! Not a genuine
That was my Gaff of the week.
So agree with other members, the scans of the OP are poor.

Hello
I've discovered this Penny Red in my stamp album : depending on the angle you look at it, it looks like a pl 77 or 71. I guess it could be a 71 as pl 77 is very scarce but the shape of the 1 is a bit rounded, not a sharp I so I was wondering it it was maybe some type of variety of the 71 ? Any help appreciated thank you !

Certainly not 77. Looks like 71.

I concur with GeoffHa. Looks like 71.

Plate 77 is going to look like "11" at first glimpse, both slanting at the same angle, with small tops to each leg.
Block of 4 circa £550,000
Plate 77

All right so it's a 71 then. Thank you all for your replies. Rgds

There was another thread, here I think, or on the other SCF, a while back about Plate 77. The March-April, 2019 issue of Scribblings, the bimonthly journal from the Rocky Mountain Philatelic Library, carried an in-depth research article on Plate 77. The focus was on the very intricate, and science based, process used to authenticate the famous Victor Hugo cover that has three copies of 77, including the only known multiple.

With addition of the cover, there are 10 known copies of 77. One is in the Royal Collection; two are in the British Library; three are in private hands; and the whereabouts of the seventh is unknown. While anything can happen, and does, the likelihood of more copies of 77 turning up is extremely low.

If the original poster remains interested in finding out if he has a 77, the stamp should be submitted for authentication and a certificate. The process on the cover involved use of microscopes to determine if paper fibers had been altered; also high resolution scanners; etc.

The stamps on the Hugo cover were printed from plate 73, NOT plate 77. How the 3s got changed to 7s are open to much heated debate on another forum (faked, altered plate or some other way) but you can't classify these as the same as the other plate 77 stamps which were all printed from plate 77.

@mikyh: I have no knowledge of any "heated debate" on an unidentified forum. But, may I humbly suggest that you track down the article and read it; www.rmpldenver.org .

Click on Publications at the top of the home page and look for the Mar-Apr., 2019 issue. The article does note that the Royal Philatelic Society Ltd. withdrew prior opinions from 2006 and 2014 that declared the cover to be a fake, and refunded the review fees, based on this in-depth forensic analysis.

This explains the Plate 73 origin of the Hugo cover, cf. the "normal" Plate 77 stamps.

http://victorhugocover.com/plate-73-connection/

Interesting, Geoff. Some of the same photos appear in the Scribblings article. The article about the cover does confirm that the 77 is genuine.

Except that the Scribblings article is not objective, because the author is the owner of the cover. His findings have been thoroughly contested in a series of articles and responses in The London Philatelist, journal of the RPSL. The Royal withdrew its prior opinions of "fake" in part to settle litigation. To understand this cover, one cannot rely only on the Scribblings article, study of the London Philatelist articles is essential. Reasonable minds can disagree as to either position, genuine or fake.

@cjpalermo: perhaps so. I'm not an expert on British stamps. I will submit, in my final comment on this topic, that one would have difficulty arguing with the forensic findings.

Opinions still seem to be strongly divided on the status of these three stamps.

The APS certificate is interesting in that it identifies the stamps as being from plate 73 altered to read "77".

That would make these a variety of plate 73 (which would certainly be very interesting) but would not make them examples of plate 77 stamps.

The RPSL withdrew its certificates, but as far as I'm aware has not changed its opinion.

I believe mikyh's reference to another board discussion was to a long and heated discussion on StampBoards.

Bump. Those with a spare £90,000 or so can snap up a Plate 77 from Gibbons on July 18.


Source: Stanley Gibbons Auctions, "Signature Auction: The J.W. Phillips Collection Part 1," 5949, catalogue p. 34., July 2023.