Post by dcstamps on Jun 9, 2014 19:48:23 GMT -5
Perforations, perforations and more perforations.
Having been given a copy of the pages for the Netherland Indies from an old Dutch Specialty Catalogue by Philatarium, I find that for the early Dutch stamps, one needs to know a lot of things about the perforations to properly identify a stamp. I could have been very happy with just a Scott's Classic catalogue, but alas, since I try and use my pages to help educate folks more about the stamps were are collecting. Unfortunately, with this additional information, I have been poisoned by knowledge.
Before we go down this road, I have a grave confession to make. I absolutely stink at measuring perforations. I have this old black, metal perforation gage, which I have had since I was a kid. Although the metal is somewhat "wrinkled", it has been in my stamp tool box for about as long as I can remember. My real problem, however, is that I can measure a perforation, write it down, measure it again and find that it has magically changed. That's OK, about 75% of the time, I can take a third measurement and determine which one was right. For the other 25%, I now have a third number to deal with ---
OK, enough of true confessions.
While I will attempt to provide some simplistic explanations, I sincerely hope that we can use the expertise of Perfs14, who posted wonderful tutorial on perforations a while back on Stamp Bears.
stampbears.net/thread/32/perforations
To properly ID the early Netherland Indies stamps one needs to determine several things. The Good news is that we don't need to worry about paper type, watermarks or printing methods. The Bad news, though is that we do need to do more than just measure the perforation. To properly ID our stamps we need to know the following:
The perforation measurement - for the King William portrait set (Scott #3-16), there were 7 different perforations which were used across many of the stamps, and one combination of two. These are:
14
13-3/4 x 13
13-1/2 x 13
13-1/2 x 13-1/4
12-1/2 x 12
11-1/2 x 12
12-1/2
a combination (I have yet to understand how this works, because I haven't translated the Dutch yet)
The perforation method - not only were there different perforations, but two different perforation methods were used during the runs (line perforations and comb perforations)
Rather than me trying to develop an explanation, here is a site with a good explanation, and helps show how to tell the difference.
www.austrianphilately.com/perfs/
Hole size - there are two different hole sizes, so we need to distinguish whether the perforation is small or large hole. As mentioned previously, Scott describes the small hole variety as having the "spaces between the holes wider than the diameter of the holes." I have been looking at both my stamps and those examples on the internet, so hopefully we will be able to tell the difference.
Color - although not as many as some other countries, there are some color shade varieties which are recorded to help identify the stamp.
Type - we have already covered this, when we discuss the two types of the one cent stamp.
All in all, of the 12 different denominations in the set, the Netherlands Specialty album distinguishes 71 different stamp varities.
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So far, I have scanned all of the stamps I have in the King William portrait set, Scott #3-16, and am measuring (and re-measuring) the perforations, to help identify whether I have any interesting varieties. I will probably display them tomorrow, when I get them done. Then we can distinguish the other characteristics together.
Michael