New Member From Finland. Seeking Advice In Identifying US Stamps (Early Postage Dues To Start With)

Hello,

I am a collector from Finland. I started collecting stamps in my child hood and have collected stamps for many decades (but I am not anywhere close to retiring). I collect world wide stamps and in that sense I am not a specialist of anything. However, if I can tell them apart, I keep every variant of the stamps I can come up with (without spending a fortune, which makes me a bottom feeder). I have 50,000-100,000 stamps in my collection from all over the world. I have many world wide catalogue sets (but all of them older editions) and specialized catalogues from many countries (many of them out of date). Old catalogues are cheaper to source and the information in them is mostly valid (and new stamps are difficult to come by, which means a decade old catalogue serves me almost as well as a new one) excluding the prices, which I am not too much interested in.

I have been lately helping a retired gentleman in selling stamps on second hand market places (common way of selling odd items in Finland). Recently I have been helping with US stamps. I have 2016 Scott US specialized catalogue.

With the first design of US postage dues. I think I can safely exclude the possibility of 1879 Special printing, which leaves me 3 different issues of these stamps (1879, 1884 and 1891 or stamp numbers J1-J7 and J15-J28). I find Scott specialized useless in explaining how to tell them apart (shades are troublesome without comparison and fading and discoloring and similar make it even more difficult).

I have also visited the excellent stamp site www.stampsmarter.org. I have used it earlier to be able to spot the differences between two versions of 2544b (3$ Space shuttle). The only place where I have found that information. I was looking that site for help, but unfortunately with my limited knowledge I was not able to use the information there to tell the 3 issues of the first postage dues of USA.

So, now I wonder if I could get help here. How should I go forward with this to get best help from this forum and to make the helping for this community members as easy as possible?



This is an example of the stamps I am talking about. Apologies for bad scann (left side has been trimmed off).

Hi Kuikka - Basically the color choices you have are between browns and clarets and your stamp is a claret which would make it a J22.

Thank you very much for your answer. So, if I understand correctly it is all about shade. If I post a batch of these stamps (22 pcs, different face values) in low resolution, is that enough to easily tell them apart?

Should be at least in general.

Welcome!

Dale

Welcome to the Forum.

Here are all. I suppose we can safely exclude the first issue from these. Please ignore any labels. I didn't have time to remove them from the scans. They are likely incorrect. If the different subshades are identifiable, I appreciate the identification, but the main concern is to get the Scott numbers correctly assigned. All help is highly appreciated.

Rogdcam, StatesmanStamper and Calstamp,

Thank you very much for warm welcome.

J1 Brown



J15 Red Brown

Rogdcam,

Based on the scans you provided, is it safe to assume all the stamps I showed are claret?

Yes, it appears that all of your Dues are claret. Many times it is not a good idea to judge color from scans (see numerous discussions on this forum) but in this case it is pretty clear.

I am fully aware of that. Calibration (or lack of it) of my scanner, my screen and your screen are all different. It looks different on my phone than on my screen. But I take your word that it LOOKS like they are claret and am fully aware that there are no guarantees on that.

Thank you very much. This has been a big help to me.

So I will hijack this thread a bit and ask about these stamps
My original identifications was that the top two rows plus the 50c on row 3 were "brown" (Scott J1-7), the middle row excepting the 50c was "red brown" (Scott J15-21), and the bottom row was "claret" (Scott J22-28), fourth row ???
But after seeing the clarets of the OP, I am having my doubts. I am now thinking the top three rows are "brown" and the bottom two are "red brown"
I know all the problems with identifying stamp colors with scans, etc. etc. but any opinions would be appreciated

Willwood - Personally I believe that your original assessment was correct keeping in mind that there are also pale brown, deep brown, pale red brown, deep red brown, light claret and dark claret depending upon denomination. On top of that you have soil, paper/ink aging and other environmental factors.

Thanks Rodgcam. I was hoping you would take a peek. Your illustrations of the brown vs red brown are outstanding stamps.

kuikka,

Collecting for the enjoyment of collecting, whatever that might be, is the name of the game. Don't hesitate to ask questions especially if you need basic information and especially more advanced sources of information for any possible topic. You should be able to find folks on this board a little further along on their collecting journey glad to share experiences. Russ