How do you display "Fly Specking"?

This is an excellent topic! Thank you for starting this thread.

I’m fairly new to flyspecking - doing this for maybe 4-5 years. Right now I have my stamps on Vario or Hagnar sheets with notes or pics of similar varieties, but I plan to take pics of my copies with arrows pointing to the “speck” with a blowup of a normal copy if it’s unclear what is noteworthy. If I purchase specialty material on album pages that have notes made by the previous collector,, I leave them as is for now and just trim the sheet to fit in a cover and put it in the appropriate section. Eventually I’ll incorporate their work with what I’ve accumulated. I like the idea that others have shown where the opposite side of the page has printed data about the stamps if the material needs a bunch of descriptive text. Otherwise I just slip a piece of paper with the pertinent info onto the stockpage.

It all takes time and I probably won’t start that project until after I finish selling off the bulk of my duplicates and finish other things I’ve volunteered to do. It’s a common stamp collector’s lament - we’d all love to see our treasures annotated and described in detail, but few of us actually accomplish that lofty goal for all of our collections.

Here is another page that shows a flyspecked item on a cover ... always fun to find them.  Since I already have a page dedicated to Australia 68c, this page does not need all of the ACSC reference material on Printer, Date of Issue, etc.  I only add a few comments and my blown up pictures showing the variety.  I sometimes add a link to further discussion.  Here, I used a big blue arrow to point out the rather obvious dot.

Partime wrote; “Always double-check with your own reference materials as they may make some interesting claims.”


Oh boy you got that right! I look at some “varieties” and I wonder what they were seeing. And WOW - the errors on perforations are rife! I re-watermark and re-perf everything! Not to mention overlooked forgeries and reprints. The notes on varieties aren’t quite as bad as other mislabeling. 

Every once in a while you get lucky and win a collection that was built and notated by a really savvy philatelist who got it right. Those are absolute treasures. My collection of used Irish overprints compiled by a gold medal winning philatelist is still intact and I use it as a reference collection. 

Nice pages and thanks for the showing Partime .

Yes, agree.  I don't collect many bigger pieces, but I would bet that some of the parcels back then needed quite a bit of postage, and, hence, a rather larger cancellation.  Maybe someone should start a thread on that?

As usual, Rod comes in with very useful information. Thanks.