Interesting Find And The Importance Of Selvage

Hi all!
Recently I've been wrestling with the concept of selvage - everyone seems to say it's important but it just doesn't look right. Well, the stamp I found today has made a believer in me of its importance! Check it:



A little bit of sleuthing (and the excellent site OzRevenues) revealed this to be a provisional revenue stamp from Western Australia, but warned that overprint forgeries were common. I was ready to stick it in the forgery pile, when a closer look at the back revealed a tiny bit of folded over selvage with a matching overprint!



Stamp's in rough shape, but even knowing I'll never get the 'mint' CV, it's still one of my better finds and an important lesson for me about selvage!

What do you guys think? Does the selvage remnant help prove the overprint genuine? I'd love to hear your thoughts/comments

Is that selvedge or is it part of the adjoining stamp?

There would be no reason to apply the overprint on the selvedge.

Ah, of course. Still learning the terms and just thought selvage meant anything left on the perfs, lol. Pardon my vocab!

The small torn piece at the bottom right of the stamp is part of another stamp, it isn't selvedge.

So slightly edited, the orignal question still seems to remain.

I would say that the piece with over print will prove that the over print in genuine.

The stamp with the Internal Revenue overprint and manuscript is definitely the real thing, the little tag on the bottom right is part of a stamp that was attached there.

Selvedge can indeed be important in the study of Australian State stamps. When I specialized in Australian State stamps in the early 1980s and was a member of the Dolly Madison Stamp Club in Northern VA, I met Hugh Wynn and helped him find material for a number of his State collections. Most notably selvedge on pieces and blocks that helped him form his collection of and write his monograph on the 1907 "Emergency" Printing of New South Wales stamps that the RSVP published in 1996. Hugh lived to be 102 or there abouts. One of the more interesting philatelists I ever met.