Lagos: Classic Stamps

Hail, Queen Victoria! After some soaking of the used stamps and surgery to remove heavy hinge remnants, I have finally cleaned up the rest of my 19th century Lagos issues, and now have a pretty nice-looking page in my album. From here, it's on to the rest of Lagos for the Edward VII issues!  Stay tuned.

Thanks for your post, Jim! Yes, I feel like all of those scanning trials and subsequent adjustments are finally paying off. Thanks again to you, classicalstamps, and @falshung, the TSF "Scan Masters" for all your advice and patience.

It is a little bit risky scanning from my hard-bound albums, but it worked all right using a clear inter-leaf sheet to hold the stamps down while laying the album on the scanner glass.

I love these old Victorian issues, so I decided to do a scan instead of just a photo this time, and I am pleased that you think the resulting image looks good.

Thanks for your nice comment, Peter.  If you would like to see the full border on one of those pages, you can see it here:

thestampforum.boards.net/post/53692/thread

My albums are the old hard-bound, brown-cover Scott International Albums, published until around 1940.  Scott still uses this same border on pages for their Specialty Series albums.  I also like the border on these pages, but in my TSF posts, I usually crop the images to eliminate most of the border ornaments just to save space.

I recently purchased two unmounted blocks of the 4d Lagos stamp with the ½d overprint issued in 1893.

On inspection of the stamps I was quite amazed to find many positional variations regarding the overprint, some were to the right, some were to the left along with high and low variations, another aspect was that some of them had ghostly markings or were partially double, none of them appeared identical, and would make an interesting study !

Here are the blocks in question, and you will see what I mean. >





The central stamp on the block of 9 had a printing error due to a foreign object traped on the gummed side, just below the crown in the centre.



How many differences can you spot ?

@paperchase,

Did the object remain on the gum side of the block and, if not, were there any indications of its presence there?

The obstruction item is probably of more interest than the surcharge variances. I see my Scott Classic Specialized Catalogue does mention that there were 4 settings of the surcharge but surprisingly they did not give examples. Wherever the surcharges were done it appears they were not too concerned with quality control. The differences are almost too many to count. It is not a country I pay attention to although I see I have 6 low denomination stamps in my worldwide collection. Your blocks are nice. 

It appears to be a natural imperfection, often referred to as a paper inclusion. The effect it had on the printing is interesting.