How stable were Belgium's early inks?

Do not know but some other member of expertise will answer you....meanwhile have fun in California !!

René

Hi, Alex (vikingeck )!

If you scroll to the top of the page, you can see that Stan (stainlessb ) has started this thread under the Belgium sub-board, so I gather that his question pertains to early Belgium. When I first joined TSF, I repeatedly forgot to check which boards and sub-boards some threads were on, and it occasionally led to my making some posts in the wrong places.

After this was pointed out to me a couple of times, I stopped making that mistake. That said, I still like it better when thread names or the initial post in a thread make it clear what area is being discussed. It's just quicker and easier for me to decide if it's even an area of interest for me in the first place.

After all of that, Stan, I am sorry to say that I do not have any special expertise on early Belgium. I have soaked a few of these with no problems, but I do not know if there are any potentially problematic issues in this area. That's the best I can offer.

To all, I did ammend my title to include Belgium as I realized after posting it thatthe "Recent Posts" and "Recent Threads" tabs do not identify this.

I will try and do better in the future

I am happy to confirm my initial soaking has resulted in no casualties!

Many thanks for your post, Bjorn (bjornbelgium).

I have particular interest in stamps with fugitive inks, and since the time that I originally posted in this thread back in 2019, I have learned that some early Belgium issues are indeed printed with aniline inks which can be fugitive, so care should be taken when soaking.

But I am curious about your comment that steaming stamps off paper would be better.  Do you know that from personal experience, or have you just read about it somewhere?

The reason I ask is that years ago I was given a collection by the widow of a man who had then recently passed away.  I very carefully sorted through a few thousand stamps, mainly old US issues, which the collector had removed from their original envelopes by steaming.  I know that this is how he did it, because his wife told me about it.

Bottom line:  sadly, more than 90% of the stamps that had been steamed off were damaged, mainly thins and pulled perforation teeth.  I have never personally tried steaming instead of soaking, but based on what I saw of these stamps from the old collector, I would be very reluctant to recommend steaming to anyone.  I don't know if it was just poor technique on his part, but the prevalence of damage was unbelievably high.

These days, to avoid problems with fugitive inks, I either float the stamps face up on the water, so that the front doesn't come into direct contact with the water, or in the case of needing to remove hinge remnants rather than original envelope paper, I use "Stamp Lift" fluid, a commercial product, applied with an art brush to the remnant bits, and I carefully remove them without moistening the front of the stamp or exposing it to water.

Anyway, I am interested in hearing more about your experience in this area.