Franqueo espana real or not please?

To help you in your research:

This is a real one with a Graus cert.

Michel no. 1 II (with tilde)

Thanks for starting this new thread, Lynn (ladydoe ).... good question!

Here is another resource that may help.  Below is an excerpt from Album Weeds, a guide to identifying stamp forgeries originally published by Stanley Gibbons in 1892, which has been revised on many occasions since then.



Based on the description and looking at your scan ("...only one line of the shading touches the F in FRANQUEO..."), it would appear to me that the right-hand image in your scan has a better chance of being genuine than the one on the left.  In this respect, it is also consistent with the image in the post by Morten (classicalstamps).

I am absolutely no specialist in this area.  I am just looking at the scans and reading the text.  I did a little other reading about these stamps, and from what I could see, it seems that there have been many reprints and forgeries of this issue, so this is a tough one to be certain of, without the opinion of a true expert.

At least you have a couple of copies of this stamp in your collection.  I don't have any, whether forgeries, reprints, or otherwise!

I hope this helps a little. 

Both your stamps are either reprints or forgeries; neither is a genuine original. The left one, I believe is a first reprint. Not sure about the one at right, but that one does not appear to be either the 2nd nor 3rd reprint. I didn't check either for forgeries.

The originals are easily identified (as can been seen in the excellent example posted by classicalstamps) by the 23 relatively uniform white lines in the bottom right spandrel, and also the break in the bottom left white oval/arc to the upper left of the "ESP".

Both the OP's stamps have a complete white oval/arc near "ESP", indicative of the reprints. Both have the tilde over the N. I'm not sure if the reprints are supposed to have a complete white oval at bottom, like the left example. Again, I didn't look up the forgeries.

Even if fakes I would keep them in the collecion, with a little note beside of explanation .
Personally I keep and collect forgeries, very good in future for comparison.

If you count the number or horizontal lines just above the rl1 on the bottom-right corner, well, there is a huge difference and that's just the first thing i focused on...
The cursus's golden rule "rare stamps not certified = 95% forgery" is most of the time interpretated as: my stamp is among the 5% ones... Maybe should be changed a little: rare stamps not certified = forgery...