Top 5 Items of the last 3 months…
I’m a bit behind on my blogging so I’ve decided to cheat and do three months in one. Hopefully I can find some items for the December report otherwise I’ll cheat again and edit this report to make it for the last four months…
The first item this month is a pane of the 4d green & brown. This is actually the scarcest of the settings for the 4d which shows the thin coloured lines at the right (as opposed to the filed-in bars). The retail price for Stanley Gibbons is £2’500 for such a pane, so the new owner of this item may well have got a bargain at £355.25, but since it wasn’t sold by a regular vendor of stamps I fear that it might not have been perfect. The colour of the green looks slightly faded in the image and no mention was made of the gum so that put me off bidding. But I should really have sent a question to the vendor…
Next up is an impressive printing error on the ½d vermilion, caused by the corner of the sheet being folded over before printing resulting in a portion of the stamp being printed on the gummed side. They are not massively uncommon, and I always feel dealers ask too much for such items. So it was surprising to me that this sold for £446.
This attractive franking also surprised me by fetching £100. These high franking combinations of stamped-to-order postal stationery uprated with Jubilees always seem to sell well.
My best ebay purchase of the Autumn season is a 2d that shows the variety “bottom right corner of tablet raised” (SG K30f), which catalogues £90 unmounted in my old 14th edition SG Specialised catalogue, and for which I paid the princely sum of £4.32. There are unnoticed catalogued varieties on stamps to be found on ebay, but it is a laborious task!
And we finish with this unusual combination of a late usage of a line engraved 1d red and a ½d vermilion which sold for £16.95.
The 1887 Jubilee Issue 