Tuvalu Bleeding Fish, 45c, (1982)

This nice Tuvalu variety occurs once per sheet of 38, cylinder 1A. Very strange sheet format with horizontal and vertical gutters and 2 labels. The master sheets had 1A and 1B side by side and cut apart after printing. That means 1 out of 76 stamps have this variety. 38,000 stamps were printed so only 500 "bleeding fish" stamps exist.




Normal, Left. Bleeding, Right

Position on sheet of 38 in dark brown:

Nice work BeeSee.
how did you make the sheet position image?

Rod, I drew it up in AutoCad, a vector based engineering program, then converted it as a raster JPEG. In Paintshop Pro (similar to Photoshop) I added the colours, and reduced to the size I wanted.

The light brown represent stamps on the sheet, and white is the gutters and margins, while the black lines are the perforations.

As I said only 500 exist with the "bleeding fish" variety. Mint are findable, as the left side of the pane were torn apart in blocks of 4 with margins and stapled into booklets with other values. Stamps from cylinder 1B met the same fate.

Tuvaluans do not buy booklets, because if they bring them home for future use, they will all stick together because of the heat in the tropics. So they were sold mainly to collectors. That makes USED examples of the "bleeding fish" very rare. I do not even have one :( Find one for me with the proper cancel of the era and I will pay $35 U.S. or Canadian, must be VF no pulled perfs, common on this issue.

I forgot to mention, it exist overprinted "Official" too. However, no booklet panes were made as such, so used examples are not as rare as the regular ones.