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thank you

And for the fluid, how does it react with gum ?

As a professional organic chemist, I can say that used fluids should not react or even dissolve the gum on stamps.

The gum is water-soluble and fluids are mostly non-polar (or slightly) volatile solvents where the gum is not soluble. Even in ethanol it will take several hours for gum to be dissolved if ever.

The best way is to drop a small amount of fluid on your stamp (on the back) and watermark if present will show up. The detection is not necessary to be long and this also can avoid some damage to gum.

Cochin watermarks except on the first issues (on the ornamental issues) are very easy to see, even without any fluid. Just put your stamp through some light and the umbrella or part of the later watermark will show (looking at your stamp through window is usually sufficient). Of course, in the day only.

The latest...

Holding the stamp against the white screen of the laptop in a dark room also brings out the watermark quite easily for most stamps.

try it out...

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Or put your stamp on scanner and give it scanning. With an intense light you will see watermark too.

And now more seriously, there are many methods for watermark detection. Some of them are universal and mostly valid for easy-to-see ones and others, more sophisticated for a difficult ones.

Like Ronsonol Lighter Fluid. I might not use it for extremely expensive stamps, but for a quick dip/view it works well and if you take a bit sniff you feel better.....

Now you know what I've been doing most nights.

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Finally got around to looking at the prices realised from the recent Harmers (London) auction. Some of them caused a pretty sharp intake of breath

Lot 254: Bhopal cover with a block of eight and a single of SG 61, creases and one stamp of the block defective, with BPA Cert.: £1600 (80 times Gibbons cat. for a single on cover!)

Lot 255: Bussahir cover with SG 9, with BPA Cert.: £2600 (2½ times Gibbons cat. for a cover)

Lot 256: Cochin ½ Puttan ps envelope, with a pair of SG 2, BPA Cert.: £650 (around 8 times Gibbons for a single)

Lot 257: Dhar cover with SG 5, BPA Cert.: £800 (1.4 times Gibbons for the cover)

Lot 258: Indore cover with SG 1: £320

Lot 278: Poonch cover with pair of SG O6 (one with corner crease), BPA Cert.: £1250 (used unpriced in Gibbons)

Lot 283: Wadhwan cover with SG 5, BPA Cert.: £650 (1.8 times Gibbons)

The message is clear: get your postal history now, before it gets even worse

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'First I'll steal all the money, then I'll kill everybody, and then I'll go away', Père Ubu

It occurred to me after that last post, that I should try to balance it by recording the disappointing realisations, but they're pretty hard to find.

Lot 265 was a cover with a pair of the Kashmir ¼ Annas, SG 90, not tied to the cover, but with a BPA Cert. This was estimated at £1000 and sold for £900. The next lot was also a cover with a pair of SG 90, tied by the British CASHMERE CDS, without a Certificate, estimated at £400 and sold for £390. From the descriptions and photos, the only serious difference between the two that I can see is the presence or absence of the BPA Certificate. The first price looked high, but the second comparatively too low - or perhaps, the first was simply too high. I have several covers of the ½ Anna, but none of the ¼ Anna.

Lot 271 was a Jammu & Kashmir perf ½ Anna red on wove paper, SG 124, on cover, with BPA Certificate, estimated (ambitiously I think) at £2000, which didn't sell, and the next lot was an ordinary ½ Anna rose, SG 146, with the 3-ring Anant Nag CDS on cover, estimated (too high again) at £100, which didn't sell either.

Lot 280 was a Sirmoor 1 Anna, SG 8, on an internal cover (creases and staining), with a BPA Certificate, estimated at £1500, which also failed to sell. This was the only real surprise to me: a very serious rarity, at a reasonable price. I hope it returns some day when I'm in a position to go after it

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'First I'll steal all the money, then I'll kill everybody, and then I'll go away', Père Ubu

i am surprised there was no Barwani cover.Is Barwani postal history unattractive?

Actually, the youngest cover offered was from Alwar (1901) with SG 2ac and 5e, which fetched £420. All the others were older - most from the Classic era. Barwani was too 'modern', it seems.

As a matter of fact, I'm just in the middle of recording (in my auction prices file) the prices for Barwani from the April Murray Payne sale. They confirm my impression that the minimum price for a Barwani cover in 'normal' condition for Barwani is about £75, with rarer items proportionally more expensive. I think that's still rather cheap when you consider just how rare any cover from Barwani must be

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'First I'll steal all the money, then I'll kill everybody, and then I'll go away', Père Ubu

and where would that put this cover ?

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Beauty Lies In the Eyes of the Beholder.

I guess it would depend on the paper: laid or wove?

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'First I'll steal all the money, then I'll kill everybody, and then I'll go away', Père Ubu

The envelop is on laid paper whereas it is impossible to tell of the stamp stuck on the envelop. How do you find that out? Light cannot pass through 2 layers of envelop and then the stamp.

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Beauty Lies In the Eyes of the Beholder.

There are a couple of things you can try:

Squeeze the envelope gently, to separate the two sides, and then hold it up to the light. That way, you only have to look through one layer of paper and the stamp.

Hold the stamp at an acute angle to the light, and look across the surface for any signs of ribs in the paper, that would indicate laid.

Is there any date on the cover? An 1878 date would mean the stamp would have to be on laid. A date in the early 1880s would most likely mean wove paper. An 1879 date would mean laid paper was more likely than wove.

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'First I'll steal all the money, then I'll kill everybody, and then I'll go away', Père Ubu

perhaps a scan of the other side of the cover (address side) might yield some information..

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lets see

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Beauty Lies In the Eyes of the Beholder.

How do you scan your stamps ? Do you use a scanner or a hand held digital microscope ? Any suggestions on which is better ,or, any recommended device ?

I use a HP 3050 wireless device for printing and scanning. I am quite happy with the results. The only drawback is the low scan speed at 1200 dpi. Otherwise at 200 dpi, 300 dpi and 600 dpi the scan speeds are fine. PLUS the major convenience of wifi...

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I've been using the same Canon LIDE 20 scanner for perhaps 10 years. It only provides up to 1200 dpi resolution, but that's sufficient for my needs. It isn't terribly fast for large scans at 1200 dpi, but then, large scans at that resolution are usually rather too big, anyway. Most of the time, I scan stamps at 1200 dpi and covers etc at 600 dpi, which works very well. For work purposes, I scan at 300 or 600 dpi in greyscale, which is quite adequate, and fast enough.

I use my scanner a lot, both for my stamps and for work, and it's proved extremely reliable.

I have a digital microscope also, but it's such a nuisance to use, I very rarely bother with it. Scans at 1200 dpi almost always give sufficient detail for my needs.

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'First I'll steal all the money, then I'll kill everybody, and then I'll go away', Père Ubu

Latest addition to my Bhopal:



SG 47 - the sheet of eight

It should be possible, in theory at least, to collect just about all the early Bhopal lithographed issues in sheets (SG 1 might be a bit tricky ). However, just go out and try it! Even relatively simple and inexpensive issues like this aren't at all easy.

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'First I'll steal all the money, then I'll kill everybody, and then I'll go away', Père Ubu

As for the postal history : which are the states that would qualify for the rarity list? Cochin and Jaipur covers are pretty common.

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Beauty Lies In the Eyes of the Beholder.

We first need to define 'rarity', of course But taking an arbitrary figure like £100,

Alwar - most
Bamra
Barwani - most
Bhopal - most of the pre-1908 period
Bhor
Bijawar
Bundi - any better items
Bussahir
Charkhari - most
Dhar
Duttia
Faridkot - pre-Convention era
Idar - most
Jammu & Kashmir - just about all the earlies, to about 1878
Jasdan
Jhalawar
Jind - pre-Convention era
Kotah
Las Bela
Morvi - better items
Nandgaon
Nawanagar
Orchha - most
Poonch
Rajasthan - most
Rajkot
Rajpipla
Shahpura
Sirmoor
Soruth - better items
Tonk
Wadhwan

And even the higher values of Cochin, Hyderabad, Jaipur and Travancore etc aren't at all easy to find on cover, and would probably go over £100 in most cases. For instance, Hyderabad SG 46



is rated £4 used, or using Gibbons' multiple of 5x for covers, £20. Well, I'll take all the covers of SG 46 you can offer at £20

The same applies to Jaipur. SG 14



is rated at £2.75 used, or £11 on cover, using Gibbons' multiple of 4x. Send me all your SG 14 covers - I'll gladly pay £15 each for them

Then, how on earth do you value a cover like this from Bhopal



with a copy of SG 19 with 19a?

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'First I'll steal all the money, then I'll kill everybody, and then I'll go away', Père Ubu

Thanks Tony, that's a whole lot of knowledge

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Beauty Lies In the Eyes of the Beholder.

How much premium one should pay for a sheet of 4 of Bundi over the cat value of a single stamp?

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Beauty Lies In the Eyes of the Beholder.

I'm afraid that, once again, there isn't any simple answer. In most cases, I'd say no premium. The small sheets of four were usually quite affordable, although the rupee values were another matter.

If you're buying with an eye to investment, I'd say buy only sheets - except for the most serious rarities, where sheets aren't available, or only one or two exist. If you're buying purely to collect, singles are perfectly OK, but I'd hold out for singles with sheet margins wherever possible.

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'First I'll steal all the money, then I'll kill everybody, and then I'll go away', Père Ubu

and how is this ?

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Beauty Lies In the Eyes of the Beholder.

Not bad, but in my experience, the 4 Anna value still isn't too hard to find on cover. I just checked through my accumulation of covers with 1931 set awaiting processing. Of 66 covers, 13 had the 4 Anna.

The 8 and 12 Anna and 1 Rupee on the other hand, are rare. I'm still waiting to find the 12 Anna and 1 Rupee on cover.

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'First I'll steal all the money, then I'll kill everybody, and then I'll go away', Père Ubu

what would be the approximate value for this cover anyway?

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Beauty Lies In the Eyes of the Beholder.

I'd guess around $US10.

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'First I'll steal all the money, then I'll kill everybody, and then I'll go away', Père Ubu

And what would be the worth of Mr.Tony's hoard of Indian gems.Don't worry I am too far off to rob you.( I hope it is not as secret as a woman's age)

Opkedia, the value of my collection is a much bigger secret

Actually, this raises an intriguing question: How to value collections of Indian States? The new edition of Gibbons Commonwealth catalogue is due out in September, but I doubt that it will have caught up with recent sales. And then, while I applaud Gibbons' attempt to give guidelines on pricing covers, if this cover of Bhopal SG 61 from Harmers' recent sale



is worth 80x Gibbons' used price, can I price this cover of SG 61



with a damaged SG 61b at the same?

I think around $US10 is the right price for that cover of Hyderabad SG 45 that Mukulgarga showed; Gibbons would make it £3.50. Even the more common items of postal history are edging ahead of Gibbons' prices.

Even - for Heaven's sake - ordinary Bijawar stamps! At the April Murray Payne auction, used copies of the 8 Anna, 12 Anna and 1 Rupee sold for over 100% of Gibbons prices (8 Anna: cat. £140, sold for £150; 12 Anna: cat. £140, sold for £160; 1 Rupee: cat. £190, sold for £200).

So, even if I did know what my collection is worth, I still wouldn't tell

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'First I'll steal all the money, then I'll kill everybody, and then I'll go away', Père Ubu

Tony, others - was there a reason there was so much paper wastage in the printing of many of the Indian States. Take that Bhopal. A rough guess tells me that 50% of the paper is not related to the stamps in any way. Given today they are trying to squeeze every last penny, it seems odd they would've printed so few stamps/sheet doesn't it? I mean it fits on an album page (which is really nice) but still.....

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Each "cliché"* was drawn by hand - no mechanical replication. That would tend to keep the sheet sizes to a minimum

--Andy
* I know this term is strictly incorrect in the context of lithography.

Jason, a very interesting point which will be most likely difficult to answer. I think that this phenomenon may lie in the fact that printing cliches (printing part elements) were much expensive compared to the cost of paper, cost of dyestaffs, gum (if any).

From the INDAP sample sheet, there are notations for printing India state revenues, stamped papers as well as postage stamps. Here, it is stated:

Drawing black and white design and making copper block for Court Fee stamp: 32 rupees.
Printing of 1,000 examples on gummed paper, perforated on all 4 sides and stitched to a book of 50 or 100 examples - 9 rupees.
For large series - for 5,000 stamps in one denomination - 7 rupees 8 annas.

Similar differences are also for postage stamps and half-tone copper blocks.

So, it seems that minimum reasonable amount of printing dies were used to minimize the total printing costs.

You raise a very good point, Jason. Can I add two more thoughts of my own on the question?

First, I suspect paper size might have been partly the result of interaction between available paper sizes, the size of the lithographic stone and denonimation. Remember that, at the time of the Bhopal issues, the printing would have been done on a literal stone, probably imported from Germany. The Bhopal printers seem to have had access to a couple of stones of different sizes, and I think perhaps they tried to match stone size to paper size, having regard to a rational value of the entire sheet.

They didn't start out being wasteful, anyway. Sheets of SG 2



have hardly any margins

The second point may be more debatable. Most paper was cheap, and so big margins, and big wastage, weren't a serious issue. This sheet of rather nice laid paper for SG 6 of Barwani, for example:



But when the Barwani printers produced large numbers of stamps on surfaced paper,



they were much more economical with the paper. Perhaps the price differential for the surfaced paper was just sufficient to make them more careful with it.

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'First I'll steal all the money, then I'll kill everybody, and then I'll go away', Père Ubu

Is it not also possible that the sheets were trimmed to size after printing? The Bhopal SG 2 sheet has such tiny margins that it would have been hard to remove from the printing press without smudging the wet ink.

The Barwani SG6 looks like it was trimmed on two sides and bound into a booklet as evidenced by the holes in the paper. The surfaced paper item may have been trimmed on all for sides before being bound.

Handmade native papers would have rough edges unless they were trimmed.

Some of these sheets - the Barwani ½ Anna for example - were certainly trimmed. The Bhopal SG 2s were probably trimmed, but I have three sheets of them, and all have the very close margins.

It will be an interesting project for a Winter's evening to measure the sizes of some of these sheets, and to try to estimate a rational paper size for them.

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'First I'll steal all the money, then I'll kill everybody, and then I'll go away', Père Ubu

Interesting topic and something I have wondered about too.

The first printings of the Lion stamps of Persia were actually cut as close as possible and made up into bundles by the printer.

Paper was so expensive that every little scrap was saved for recycling.

Of course in the case of Iran, the paper probably came from India to start with.

In the case of India, there are so many different factors involved-

A private printer would normally be less wasteful than government employees

Also- was the paper bought at the market , where they had to take whatever was available, or was it ordered from a mill, where the sheet size would be specified.

Fine detail about the printing of most the Indian States just isn't available, Mike.

Of course, we do know that Cochin, Hyderabad and Travancore must have ordered their paper specifically from the mills. Jaipur probably generated sufficient demand to order its paper individually. (The press sheets of the ¼ Annas, SG 22-24, are the size of junior tablecloths ) And Jammu & Kashmir produced its own native paper in the Srinagar jail

But for the States that did their own printing, generally there's almost no detail. (For many years, it was thought that Barwani didn't even have its own press.) It has to be pretty likely that these States bought their paper in the bazaar as needed - whatever type or quality happened to be in sufficient supply at the time.

Ray Benns did some very useful work for the India Study Circle on the direction of the paper mesh as a guide to distinguishing papers and printings for Alwar and Wadhwan. This subject might usefully be followed up for other States as well.

I know this begs the question whether sheet size followed available paper size, or vice versa, but that's likely to be impossible to answer.

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'First I'll steal all the money, then I'll kill everybody, and then I'll go away', Père Ubu

Is there a revival of interest in Indore items?

Another envelope from second issue on ebay

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vi ... cyo5tpX%25

Another lot sold at 50% above catalogue

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vi ... S1rcyo5tpX%

opkedia

This is the second Indore lot opkedia mentioned:



I make the 2012 cat. value to be £86, so the £113 it sold for was 30% over cat., with 24 bids from 6 bidders. I think the seller is quite reputable, and there's no question of shill bidding here.

I looked at this lot, but it's hinged mint, so it should be less attractive to the investors, and I didn't like the look of the perforations on the 4 Anna particularly.

This wasn't the only lot to go into orbit last night. This Cochin



http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=280902781599

correctly identified as SG 74a, cat. (2012) at £16 sold for £32.10. Again, described as mint hinged, and sold by an impeccable seller (mareval2).

I'd sell up all my other Uglies, and take up Bijawar ... if it wasn't already heading for the stratosphere too

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'First I'll steal all the money, then I'll kill everybody, and then I'll go away', Père Ubu

And at last I've joined the big boys ... I have my own (first, and probably last) Jammu & Kashmir Circular cover:





SG 38 - the 1877-8 oil colour ½ Anna red on European laid paper, and cancelled with Jammu Iron Mines seal

Not the most spectacular Circular cover, but a scarce stamp!

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'First I'll steal all the money, then I'll kill everybody, and then I'll go away', Père Ubu

and if I may ask? where did you find it? So that I could try for it in my next birth.

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Beauty Lies In the Eyes of the Beholder.

I'm not sure that it will help with your forward planning ... but it was in the 16 June Harmers (London) auction.

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'First I'll steal all the money, then I'll kill everybody, and then I'll go away', Père Ubu

"Nice" Kashmir circular

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Kindly notice the cancel

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This cancel appears to be British too..



This lot cannot be genuine...can it?

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Here's the only one I've got. Doubt I'll get another one either...at least, not in the foreseeable future.

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I believe there is another world waiting for us, Sixsmith. A better world.

Very nice cover Domburd. Thanks for sharing..

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Quite right, Birder, it can't I don't think I've ever seen those forged cancellations on Jammu & Kashmir before: quite a novel experience.

And the stamps ... If you want to see a typical J&K Circular impression, take a look at that lovely Circular cover of Domburd's. The illustrations in Gibbons are so clear, I think they must be taken from reprints.

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'First I'll steal all the money, then I'll kill everybody, and then I'll go away', Père Ubu