Nigeria: 1973-1986 Definitive Issue

A recent eBay purchase arrived in my mailbox last week and I have started going through the stamps. It is another Nigeria lot which I posted about here.  The stamps in the lot, with the exception of several pre-colonial stamps from Lagos, Southern Nigeria, etc..., were issued from about 1973 onward into the early 90s. It is definitely helping me fill some spaces and there are also a number of stamps from the definitive set referred to as Hides and Skins in the Scott Catalogue. 

Like the earlier animals definitives from the 60s, this is an issue with many varieties including two different printing methods, tons of color variation and a 1975-80 printing that is on watermarked paper.

As many of you know, I use Steiner pages, and Steiner follows Scott. Steiner's pages also include the Scott minor number listings for this set. Below I have cropped just the listings for this series from my 2016 Scott Catalogue so you can see how it is listed. Scott makes an error here because they don't follow their own listing policy and it has led to a lot of confusion on my part.

I circled in red, the printing method on the main set of stamps (at least according to Scott) that were issued starting in 1973. Except for the 50k denomination, all of these stamps were printed by the offset or lithography process, the 50k by photogravure.  As you can imagine, my Machin identifying skills came in handy in separating out the various printings.




But then we move onto the Scott listings for the minor varieties. Scott notes a printing of this set in exclusively photogravure, in 1973 and then goes on to list immediately below that a set printed from 1975 to 1980 on watermarked paper.  Here is a photo of the watermark on one of the 5k Cattle Ranching stamps. It is the word Nigeria in a curve. In my photo you can see the last letter of the Nigeria in the center of the paper and the letter I and R to the right. The watermark is sometimes hard to see, especially if the design on the face is dark.




So, as I mentioned above, the set from 1973 is listed as being exclusively photogravure which, again, you can see I circled in red. Scott notes at the front of the catalogue in the section that shows you how to read their listings that this header is called the "Basic Information on the stamp or set" and what is noted here holds true for all subsequent listings until a change is noted. Immediately below the 1973 set, noted as photogravure, is the watermarked set, not noted as anything except with Scott's watermark number.

So, based on Scott's own description of how to understand the catalogue listings you would think these would be photogravure, right? NO. Imagine my confusion when every stamp I have ever identified from this set that has a watermark is printed by lithography.



So with your help, now that I have the pages for Nigeria from the Michel catalogue I have been able to solve this mystery. With my handy-dandy, Michel German to English stamp terms glossary, I was able to read that the Michel catalogue notes all of the watermarked set from 1975 to 1980 as indeed having been printed by lithography rather than photogravure as Scott implies.

So thank you all who were able to "lend" me your non-Scott catalogues. I can now go back and look at all my duplicate lithographed stamps, and may be able to find the remaining watermarked stamps from this set that I was missing.