Talk:Mauritius "Post Office"

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[edit] Which stamp?

What exactly is "The stamp was owned by Sri Lankan philanthropist Sir Ernest de Silva" referring to? -Elmer Clark (talk) 01:43, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

De Silva owned the 1 penny orange-red Post Office Mauritius. The amount realized when he sold it has not been verified with a good reference. Such rare stamps often sell at 3 or 4 times their catalog value; All World Stamps today shows the stamp at £450,000. However, the amount to be realized depends on a specific stamp's actual condition, its provenance and reputation, and the vagaries of the market.Fconaway (talk) 06:58, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Fakes

Genuine

??

The illustration of the 1 penny orange-red has the appearance of a facsimile or forgery. It is certainly different from the stamp de Silva purchased from Hind, as shown by Helen Morgan's Blue Penny Research Companion.Fconaway (talk) 22:39, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

• The illustrated stamp definitely is one of many fakes of this issue; I have so noted below the image. Ecphora (talk) 09:47, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

How can you be sure it is a fake? Can that be verified?Fconaway (talk) 19:16, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Absolutely. As background, there are multitudes of fakes of both rare and inexpensive stamps. See, e.g., Fernand Serrane, The Serrane Guide; Stamp Forgeries of the World to 1926 (1998) (containing 390 pages of detailed information on early forgeries); Varro Tyler, Focus on Forgeries (1993), who notes that "Some forgeries of inexpensive stamps are so ubiquitous that the copies in general collections far outnumber the genuine ones." Serrane notes that there are "various typographed or lithographed reproductions [of the "Post Office" issues] ... easily identifiable by their kind of impression." Id. p. 234.

Now, to the stamp in question, comparison with the one penny red (which I scanned from David Feldman's auction catalog of Kanai's collection (1993), Lot no. 1, which sold for 1.4 million Swiss Francs plus surcharge (over $1 million US), and which unquestionably is genuine) shows a multitude of differences. These include: the shape of the necks and lower front of the busts, the upper right corners (lobed in the forgery; square in the genuine); the blotches on the face of the fake; the overall detail(blurred and splotchy in the forgery -- probably lithographed and not engraved); detailed and fine in the genuine); the backgrounds (solid in the forgery; finely engraved in the genuine), etc.

But there's one simple and definitive proof. The two stamps are plainly different, but the Kanai red penny is the only unused one penny in existence; the only other known copy was lost in WWII. See Feldman catalogue, p. 29. Ecphora (talk) 02:42, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

That may well be so, but even so the alleged forgery may be a badly scanned image, or it could be a bad scan from one of the proof reprints like this one. we don't know where that image came from. ww2censor (talk) 04:49, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

You're right. It's hard to believe that a reprint from the original plate could be so bad, but it might be. I'll look for an image of a "genuine" fake. Ecphora (talk) 12:22, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Believe me, as a photographer for more than 25 years, a bad quality photo of a genuine stamp, then digitised badly and (maybe) copied again could after several iterations certainly look like this alleged forgery. so until we can find an image of a known forgery, we should delete it from the article. ww2censor (talk) 13:10, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Article revision

I have done an extensive revision of the article previously titled "Penny Blue" to include both "Post Office" issues and discussion of the subsequent locally produced primitives. Ecphora (talk) 11:53, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Some of this has been moved to Postage stamps and postal history of Mauritius. Ecphora (talk) 03:12, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

The Queen's head and the lettering are all intaglio. Shouldn't this be pointed out?Fconaway (talk) 15:42, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Done. Thanks. Ecpphora (talk) 01:21, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the quick work! "Intaglio" has another meaning, which is important in comparing the "Post Office" Mauritius stamps with the Penny Black. It is not simply that they have an image of the young queen, facing to the viewer's left. In this respect the stamps are similar, although Wyon's modelling of the head (as seen on his 1837 London medal)[1] was masterful whereas Barnard had little sense of line or sculpted relief. Their striking similarity is in the use of an elegant intaglio image: the letters and the heads are in the white (or "negative") space. This became the conventional presentation in the Penny Red and 2d Blue, and so on, through the first issues of India. Recess printing is involved, to be sure, but only for the details of the relief. It means something different in recess printed issues, where the ink is forced into the recesses and the surface is wiped clean -- almost the opposite procedure of that used for these first stamps.Fconaway (talk) 02:17, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

I'm sorry, but I don't understand. Every place I looked states that the Mauritius Post Office issues as well as the early British stamps were all printed in intaglio, without any suggestion that a different process was used for parts. See Williams, Fundamentals of Philately, p. 523 n. 94 (Mauritius); Stanley Gibbons, Great Britain: Vol. 1, Queen Victoria (1985) p. 33. Williams doesn't describe any other meaning for intaglio, other than printing from recesses in the plate. See pp. 118-119. The only variants mentioned in the intaglio article are the methods for cutting the plate; however it's done, all the printed features in intaglio come from ink in the recesses. Am I missing something? Ecphora (talk) 20:10, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Yes. The design of the stamp was an intaglio image. That is, the letters and the heads are in the white (or "negative") space while the background is in color.Fconaway (talk) 20:59, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

OK. There's no difference in the printing method itself; it's just whether the artist depicts the image as primarily white on colored background or vice versa. Ecphora (talk) 22:46, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Yes. This is shown strikingly by Plates I and II of the book, _Rowland Hill and the Fight for Penny Post_, facing pages 78 and 79, if you happen to have that book available. It became a conventional design feature for many of the early stamps of the British areas.Fconaway (talk) 05:37, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

Nice job! ww2censor (talk) 15:20, 1 May 2008 (UTC)