Penny Red

One item that caught my eye last night was this on-piece penny red, stars in corners that was hinged into the GB area of one of the old albums I bought. What struck me was not so much the stamp but the nice cancellation. I have an GB concise and will attempt to identify the stamp later today but for now, here is this really great Edinburgh cancel.

Thank you for the information Alex (vikingeck ). This will be going into my GB collection as is. Also, what does the W A mean?

I believe the letters WA may indicate the desk or the clerk who cancelled that particular batch of mail.

The Post office in those days was jealous of keeping up to time and not delaying the Mail. So datestamps often had a time slug , or a desk identifier so that if Mr Smith complained that his letter took 3 days to get delivered the inspector could check back and see if someone was to blame for a delay.

By 1900 it was possible to post a letter in the morning and have it delivered that same day in the afternoon

Good morning to all collectors of GB Penny Reds! I have recently started writing and publishing a series of blog posts on the Queen Victoria issues of Great Britain, which has been made possible by a very large auction purchase that I made last month. I bought approximately 2,700 imperforate penny reds, about the same number of perforated issues, and about 4,000 surface printed stamps. Of course, all of this material will go into my weekly auctions, but I am a philatelic writer first and a stamp dealer second, so I jumped at the opportunity to get my hands on this material, as it meant finally having a quantity sufficient to warrant the purchase of the Stanley Gibbons Queen Victoria specialized catalogue, and the opportunity to write and publish some blog posts on these areas.

Most of you will not recognize me probably because I haven't been active on here in at least four years, probably longer. When my business went into survival mode, I was forced to abandon my writing to focus on building my weekly auction and customer base. But, I'm still here, with a thriving weekly auction and have now finally had the opportunity to return to writing and publishing my blog posts.

So anyways, I got to reading the SG specialized a few weeks ago, and OMG it blew me away. It takes a lot to do that now, but I was just struck at how fascinating this line engraved material is, and how, even after nearly 175 plus years, there are still mysteries to be unlocked about the stamps. So, I started with the imperforate penny reds and offered last week, all the plated stamps that were in the lot. Now, after that sale I wrote and published the first of my posts, which you can read here: brixtonchrome.com/blogs/classic-worldwide-stamps-1840-1940/the-imperforate-penny-reds-of-great-britain-1841-1854.

After I published this post, I sorted the remaining penny reds (about 2,100 or so of them) into the corner letter positions and then decided to focus on specific sections of the sheet, updating my initial blog post with additional comments as I went. After a while, I fell into a pattern for each row: I would start with all the nicer VG, F and VF stamps that I had, which had some eye appeal and would list those. Then, for each letter I went about identifying the alphabets 1 and 2. What struck me is that once you have 20 or 30 stamps in front of you, it is relatively easy to spot the difference between the two. So, I decided to make up reference lots for each letter row in each of the two alphabets from the, shall we say, less desirable copies. It's a good use for them, as they aren't really suitable for anything else, but they work perfectly for this purpose. Then, I went through the remainder and looked for constant varieties, recut frames, weak corners, ray flaws, ivory heads etc. and took those out, combining them into groups of 2-8 stamps. Then, I looked for any face-free examples with poor margins that would be good for constructing shade pallettes, and grouped those. Then, I looked for legible cancels and took those out, separating them into London district cancels, England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland, and using an online copy of the Postmarks of the British Isles to identify them all. Then, whatever was left over I just put aside.

I worked through rows A through J, which is exactly half of a typical sheet, and have offered everything that I pulled out in this week's auction. Of course, as I was doing this several thoughts came to me, and so I added additional comments and observations in the blog post that I published. If you are so inclined you can view this week's auction here: brixtonchrome.com/collections/running-auctions?page=5. The penny reds start about mid way down the page and go to page 8.

It did occur to me that my regular bidders will get "penny red fatigue" if I offer rows K through T next week, so I've decided to give them a rest for a while, while I move on, next week to the perforated penny reds, and then to surface printed material. If you want to see a schedule of what I will be offering and when, you can view that here: brixtonchrome.com/pages/tentative-auction-schedule-for-2021. You just need to be aware that due to the complexity of these issues and the sheer volume of material that I am handling that the exact timing of the themes probably will change. But the themes themselves won't, nor will the order in which I am offering them.

Anyways, I hope I haven't broken any rules here with regards to self promotion. I hope it will be clear that my first motive with all of this is to develop my knowledge and share it with collectors everywhere. The business end of things is a necessary means to the end of having the time to actually devote to writing the posts, and to clear the way to buy more stamps so that I can research and publish posts on a new and different area.

I hope you enjoy the posts as I publish them, and I would of course welcome your comments. I may or may not have time to incorporate them all in the form of edits, but I will do my level best to use them to improve the quality of my posts.