Philatelic Surgery: Diagnosis, Prognosis & Outcome

I agree the drying book was a miserable failure for me.  If the stamp has any drop of water on it the drying book sucks it up and warps.  I usually lay the dripping wet stamps on a paper towel they lay them on a cardboard stiffener, wax paper and another cardboard stiffener and then I really heavy book.  I find US self-adhesive stamps the most difficult to get off.  For those I use STAMP LIFT and mess with the stamps trying to get the sticky gum off the back of the stamp.  That usually takes a lot of patience.  I have found self-adhesives from other countries come off much more easily and nicely.  Some US stamps are so stuck I trim the edges as close as possible and call it good.  USPO must really want to make sure there is no chance of a stamp being reused.  The glue they use is something else.

The only countries I try for pure MNH is Italy, Vatican and the artic stamps such as BAT, FSAT, Ross Island, AAT and etc.
Nick

The only solution I know is to gently unroll and place in vario sheets and then place heavy books on top for a few days. I am doing that with a few stamps now. It will not eliminate the curl but will relax them enough to place in mounts or properly place them on your Vario sheets for the country they belong to.

rod222: Sorry to be late in following up on your point above.  I have moved the discussion to this thread from the Today's Mail thread.  As I mentioned in a follow-up post, I decided to take the precaution of doing a trial soak on some of the yellow envelope material (please image below).  The material was indeed colorfast, so I was able to soak the stamps off in the usual way without any problems.  I will post scans of the stamps in a Sri Lanka thread at some point.

Anyway, thanks for expressing your concern, Rod.  It didn't turn out to be a problem, but it was a good idea on your part for me to approach the soaking with caution so as not to ruin the stamps.

You're almost correct, not seawater, but the humid climate - these stamps were made in Denmark and the gum will quickly soften and stick the the sheet below.
so they had to soak most of the sheets upon arrival to be able to separate them.

and the original batch had a white gum from Copenhagen (these are quite rare) the yellow gum was applied in St. Thomas, and the brown gum was applied in St. Croix.

the rectangular strike on the 7 cent is "UTILSTRÆKKELIGT FRANKERET" insufficient postage, these are suspect to debate as they are very common and usually only on 7 cent. While no one knows for sure, it's extremely likely that whole sheets were cancelled with these by collectors/dealers because;

Legitimate cancelled 7 cents are far less common than both NH and MH stamps. 
The sheer amount of philatelicly created entires from DWI is percentwise much higher than most other countries and in this period of time we start to see a lot of this happen.
and last but not least, postal officers were a proud bunch able to correctly figure out correct rates in seconds, and while i'm not sure if it's true for DWI, but in Denmark the postmaster had to pay of his own pocket for any mistakes made. And to get this wrong every now and then i guess could be understandable. but not as many times as they occur, and why only 7 cent stamps?

these are valid reasons as why to suspect these cancels to be fabricated CTO stamps.

I have close to a 1000 MNH Danzig stamps, the disturbing thing is they are attached to each other due to humidity where they once have been stored. This is what it looks like on a few of the massive amount I have

Not sure if I have already posted this but can’t find it. Still working my way round.  Just wondering if I could do something with these old stamps to see them better. 

marbles as Alex has said there is little to be done with these other than maybe a bath. The lower scanned page are earlier British Guiana as tagged and they often require some study for paper type and perforations. The perforations are notoriously rough on the early issues so your examples look pretty normal. If they were mine I would probably do nothing with them. PS : I am referring to your second posting. I see you had posted a little earlier with three photos.