Greece Hermes Heads

TSF member jkjblue comments in his blog entry about Greece Hermes Heads that the Hellas catalogue "is great for color breakdown" -- perhaps he can comment regarding its suitability as a color guide.

Thanks for the blog post

@nl1947 - Thank you for sharing those reference links for Hermes - very useful indeed.
I think I found those sites when I did my Hermes the last time - your work was a huge help. Bookmarked now for future reference. Thanks again.

Jon 

Anyone know the numbers?

Thank you once again!

I am going to take on a small project and try to correctly identify these Hermes Heads from Greece one by one using three resources. One resource will be my Scott Catalogue, Volume 3, G-I, 2016 and the other will be the Big Blue website as he breaks this issue down in much more detail which I am sure will help quite a bit.

The remaining resourse will be you. You are all welcome to participate but I want to go stamp by stamp and explain exactly what stamp features are determining the identity of each stamp. So, if you think you know a catalogue number, year of issue, etc...please explain why you think so and point out in your post, in detail, how you came to that determination. If you have any questions about each stamp, or feel you need me to provide more information about a particular stamp....watermark, hold it up to the light, scan at a higher dpi, etc...let me know and I will do so.

So here is the group of stamps I pulled from an old collection purchase at a stamp show back in July 2019 (see above comment). I will start with the top row, left-most stamp which is brown and denominated 1 lepton. Let me first start out by pointing out that I have scanned the front and back of the stamps as one of the identifiers for this series is whether there is a back number printed on the stamp. As you can see, in this case, there are none (except for the penciled catalogue numbers..disregard these as we are still going to look at them in detail with our resources) so we have already eliminated quite a number of stamps for identification purposes.

Comparing the stamps that zipper showed above, I'd say yours are Athens prints, darkormex . They don't look as nice as zipper's!

I am going to begin this again and have expanded my sorting to all of the Hermes heads that I own. I realized I had a bunch of these previously mounted in my Scott International set that I have been slowly removing stamps from as I move over to Steiner. I have grouped them by denomination and will start with the 1 lepton, Small Hermes Head (numeral tablet) issues and see if I can make that final determination in all cases as to whether we are looking at Belgian prints or Athens prints and then mount them on the pages I printed this afternoon. Here is a look at all of them.

I only have this single copy of the 2 lepta, imperf, pale bister, but again, I am pretty sure it is the Athens print (poor impression) based on sight. The Scott no. is 91. There is also a 91a that is designated as buff rather than bister. Let me know if anybody thinks otherwise. Another good reason for shying away from the idea that this is the Belgian print is that the used 2 lepta value for this stamp, Sc. no 65, is valued at $225.00 in my 2016 Scott. I have my doubts that this is anything but the Athens impression.

Scott no. 93, 10 lepta, yellow, has two additional minor varieties, 93a. orange and 93b. dull yellow. I don't think I am going out on a limb here by saying that these are 93a, the orange variety and they are also Athens impressions. We will be coming up on a couple of Belgian prints soon so the difference between the two prints will become obvious but it is really noticeable in Hermes' hair. If you can't distinguish fine detail in the hair, it is pretty much an Athens print. Also broken and/or blotchy borders are a giveaway.

The 25 lepta has 4 possible color varieties, dull blue, Sc. no. 95, indigo 95a, ultramarine 95b and bright blue 95c. I think my copy is either ultramarine or bright blue, what do you all think? Distinguishing colors is not my strong suit. Regardless it is an Athens print.

The 25 lepta, Sc. no. 96 can only be an Athens print as this denomination in this color was not printed in the earlier 1886 series. Scott also lists a minor variety, 96a, red violet and I am inclined to think these two stamps are the minor variety. The right stamp will go on my pages as it has nice wide margins and no hidden damage as far as I can see.