Austria: Issues with Varnish Bars, 1899-1904

stainlessb You had me intrigued with lacquer barred stamps so I looked in my Scott catalogue. I have lots of early Austria but had not chased the varieties. Scott calls them varnish bars so now I must take a look. Will they jump out at me?

Thanks Stan stainlessb. Under a bright light I instantly found a couple. If you look close I was even able to capture a bar on the 60 helller under the chin. These are much easier to find than imaginary US stamp varieties. 

You will notice on my photo that the cancel is actually fainter over the lacquer/varnish bar which makes sense. The raw paper would absorb more ink. 

New thread created from posts on this subject in the Whatcha thread.

From the lot shown on stock pages- these are all with lacquer/shellac/varnish bars. I tried skew the color settings to see if I could get the  bars to better show with not much luck. Top rw  1st, 3rd & 4th  5 Heller show traces of the bars, 2nd row left-most 20 heller, 3rd row 25 heller between the two 35 hellers, and the far right 5 heller, print color value.. Now to sort by perfs.

and soak the other page ( needed a break from the "scrolls". which interestingly were 1 and 2 Guilden.

Here's a group of 4

 normal scan, bottom left is obvious

here's back-lit as color negative. All 4 show lacquer barsm though top right is the faintest


Seems a viable tool. I played with the color mix and cutting the blue almost out helped a little, but not enough (based on a small test group) to set color settings to that. The default seems good enough

stainlessb these are great scans!

Another tweak you can try is after you scan, go into the "Channels" tab and you can use the "eyeballs" to turn on only 1 channel at a time, R, G, or B. And then apply your processing and see if what you're looking for shows up more.

You can also convert the image to CMYK, and then go to the channels tab and turn on one at a time like before.


Here's how to convert to CMYK




Here's where the channels tab is usually located

Interesting. I had never given a great deal of thought as to how the laquer bars were applied.  I found the following HERE

Experiments were begun using sheets of 1890, 1891, and 1899 issues. The State Printing Works applied to the sheets stripes (aka bars) of varnish (aka enamel) running from top left to bottom right at an angle of 45 degrees; the stripes were 3½mm wide with 3½mm spaces between, giving part of 4 or 5 stripes per stamp, the stripes being printed over the existing design. The Postal Administration then took some old cancellers from their stores and experimented; they found that the cancelling ink did not 'take' on the varnish, but also failed to make much impression on the unvarnished paper. Eventually they found that if they used narrow bars and wide inter-stripe spaces, the cancellations became readable.

The article "Varnish Bars and how (not) to photograph them"is an interesting read, but muddies the waters regarding when the lacquer  bars were applied, and then goes on to discuss dull and shiny... which I may need to read a few more times.

I looked through mine and I have only these three that look somewhat close to yours


I routinely soak to remove hinges and paper remnants using warm water  (~135 -140ºF from my hot water tap) with a drop or two of clear dish detergent, often followed by short rinse (also warm water) then into 3% peroxide.  Depending on how many stamps in the "batch" some could remain in the initial 'bath" for up to 30-40 minutes. I will satrt removing stamps that I can see have released th ehinge or paper, then rinsed and into peroxide in smaller batches.Peroxide-  I now limit to 10 minutes after the testing I recently did with Chris ( Beryllium Guy ) which  seemed to indicate that little  was to be gained with prolonged peroxide soaking - and longer could potentially cause some 'dulling".

Now my curiosity is piqued and I will go through my culs and see how many lacquer stripes I can come up with and see if I can replicate the conditions silmilar to yours.  Any idea as to whether the denominations might be the last printing applied?. it looks like maybe they suffer the most