Is There A Way To Clean This Orange Stamp?

Congrats on 1000 posts

Folks can look up the definitions of 'conservation' vs. 'restoration'.

I support folks being able to do whatever they want with what they own. If you want to light your cigar with your stamps and covers have at it. In my opinion and in a public community like this it is important to make sure that folks have an understanding of good stewardship and can make informed decisions. Being a good steward of the material we temporarily possess means not making permanent alternations but rather conserving it the best we can.
Other hobbies like coin collecting penalize 'cleaning' in almost any form. In the years ahead no one knows if stamp collecting will share that perspective. This fact alone should give folks pause if they care at all about the value of their material.
Don

Thanks, I did not notice that until I saw your comment which being on page two I did not even think it applied to me.




While I don't disagree with this Don, preservation of paper books is done by chemical alteration of the acidic paper and acid resulting from air contact with the pollution therein with a process called deacidification. The acids are chemically neutralized with application of an alkalizing agent. This removal of adverse paper chemicals is actually rather consistent with the reduction/neutralization of grease and oil by a solvent.

The above results from advances in technology. But as technology has advance in the realm of philately, we now need technology to tell us if a stamp is the correct color for the correct reason. Thus just because two stamps look identical in color, a diffuse reflectance spectroscopy analysis reveals which stamp should be accepted as the proper but same color as the rejected stamp color. Recently there was a SCF thread about that very issue. https://goscf.com/t/79821

Edit: I have a kid who does gene splicing among other bio-engineering fun. He said he could run such color tests for me if I just bought a machine for him. There are a couple of covers I'd rather get.

Contemplation complete. I'm not going to do anything to the stamp. Whatever stain that is, it's been there for a long time and is probably well into the paper fibers. I doubt restoration is feasible. And cleaning it just to reduce the stain a little seems like a bad idea. I'd love to try the sonic screwdriver trick Parcel wrote about. But only because it sounds like fun.

PPG,
Having trained conservationists utilized paper saving chemical treatments is a fair distance from posting possible home treatments in an anonymous public hobby forum. For whatever reason(s), hobbyists seem to like playing home chemist to make their stamps and covers look better. And the fact is that many people think 'if a little of X is supposed to work, I'll use 3 times the amount because my stamp I do not want to wait'. A good example is the often-seen hydrogen peroxide to 'freshen up' an orange stamp. It is not that hard to bleach the color right out of a stamp with over exposure. Yet we rarely see this warning posted, nor do we see much discussion about the strength of the peroxide or how a new bottle of peroxide can be much stronger than one that was opened 10 months ago. It is not much different than the recommendation that people use graphite on a grilled stamp. We now have many grilled stamps which look like they were laying on a coal mine floor.

In my opinion I would rather post that folks take care and 'do no harm'. I am comfortable that no one will post in the future, 'hey, I did what Don posted and my stamp was ruined' (I am not anonymous like you). As a matter of public service to the hobby in a 'public square' like this, I think it wisest to err on the side of caution.

I applaud rlsny's decision, leaving the patina or 'condition history' of this stamp. And as someone who has purchased from him before, I am comfortable in buying from him again after reading this thread.
Don

Except for the area near the top where the staining is worst on the front, the gum over the rest of the stamp appears pretty uniform. I serious doubt that this was ever used, much less cleaned and regummed. I am with rlsny that the dark spot is a stain that was bad enough to soak through. I would leave it alone and replace it with a clean copy if it mattered. But it is nicely centered and that counts for something. I'm not wild about the perfs at the bottom, but otherwise they are proper. And the residuals of the plate number entry at the top make it just that much more interesting.

I think you've all said it before.

How to Detect Damaged, Altered and Repaired Stamps by Schmid, Paul W. is a reference beginning.

While I agree with what you said, Don, especially how folks behave (if a little is good, lots is better; well until the Acetaminophen requires a liver transplant).

We are entering an era in which certain truthful information is "bad" (whatever that is). Yet here the problem in philately with censoring truthful but perhaps "bad" information is it prevents later understanding.

Example: Scott US #1488 without yellow color. Until ones knows how the yellow can be easily removed intentionally or more important, unintentionally, one cannot understand why the stamp is not a missing color error.

It takes knowing processes to understand what the process result can or may look like. Similar to having to know how to build bombs to be useful on the bomb squad diffusing same or knowing how to built locks leads to knowing how to defeat (pick) one. For Copernicus' missing yellow, chemicals or radiation is the explanation.

Even the mainstream hobby understands the need to make allowances to reality. For example why is there no gum expected on Germany B68 and C57-58? Those stamps were issued with full gum. Ah, but the gum was sulfuric acid based and over time will eat (destroy) the stamp paper. The hobby adjusted as did the catalogs.

US Sc #1552, 10 cent precanceled self adhesive, is difficult to find without toning or age spots due to adhesive deterioration which is prevented by storage in cool places (refrigerator or freezer). Thus toned stamps are generally the norm and are expected with no particular premium for 'not yet toned.'

So in a perfect world I heartily agree with you Don and trust me, I wish the world was perfect. Alas, it is not; especially where humans are involved. Thus knowledge is not bad, the actions one takes based upon knowledge, well that may very well be bad.

Lastly, many of the stamps cleaned by the 'ultrasonic dealer' nearly 40 years ago are well absorbed into the hobby as uncleaned stamps or not dirty stamps.

Of course I have not been speaking of the "acceptable" damaged and altered stamps and covers for which collectors pay huge sums. Can you say, "Oh, the humanity...":






Image from Siegel's Auction Gallery.

Paul's book is out of print but I have digitized it for him and made him CDs so if anyone wants a copy I can get you Paul's contact info and they can buy a CD from him.

I certainly have no issues with the sharing of information, it has been my career for the last 3 decades. My closing words on this topic is this; I have never seen anyone regret simply conserving a stamp or cover. But I have seen many stamps and covers which have been irrevocably altered, lost value, and lost detail which our hobby will never be able to retrieve.
Don

If it was me, I'd try parcelpostguy's method; relatively uninvasive method though you need to have a liquid that produces bubbles from cavitation; I don't know if safe watermark fluid does that. And it's a process that should take only a few seconds, so it it doesn't work in that time, it's not going to work. My guess is that will not remove the stain entirely. It will not improve the oxidation/sulfurization elsewhere around the head.

The "sanded perfs" are not that but are likely the result of breaking up the multiple this probably comes from, many years after leaving the post office. Not carefully done here, I might add. Gum (and paper) can get brittle over the years and this is the result with the soft American Bank Note paper here still in decent shape. Further, sanding perfs is done by regummers. I expect no regummer is going to sand perfs while putting what looks to me like at least two obvious hinge marks on the stamp.

Well if another anonymous person says he would do it, then everyone should run their stamps and covers through ultrasonic cleaning.
Don

Back in the 1970's, 1980's & early 1990's I saw both reperfers and regummers "sand" perfs and then add one or two hinge remnants to their jobs. "Sanding" perfs conjures images of files or sandpaper which less experienced mechanics use(d). The sanding was more a buffing using a fine cloth wheel and the hinge remnants took attention away from the regumming. A lot of regumming and reperfing done then was not to create VF/NH results but to create items that would pass the "skim over" test, that is, a glance or causal inspection of a larger lot or by a less experienced dealer/collector. There exists a good amount of lesser value items altered that were meant to complete sets or album pages for appearance sake.

That is because they did not know what they were doing. While I agree that there are other ways to read a grill, when done correctly it leaves very little residue. But it requires a very light touch.