Great Britain Philatelic Society

Hello all,
As collectors of Postal History we like to check out as many aspects of the
old letters as possible.

When transcribing the letters we came across quite a selection of watermarks
and wondered how to get copies to illustrate them.

We asked on a chat board and the resulting suggestions left us floundering
in a mass of technical jargon and sophisticated equipment.

As that was beyond us we did a bit of experimentation and came up with a
typical Australian type answer. We took the somewhat laid back approach and
I held the letter against a window with the sun shining directly on it.
Eunice took a digital photo of it and the watermark came out remarkbly well.
We attach a couple of examples to show the results.
Does anyone recognise the initials below the posthorn Is it H and B or FC and B?
Or neither of the above! The second image also has the fancy initials but
seem clearer and easier to read. This is the only one we have showing this
form of the Fleur de Lys.

Are any other members interested in this aspect of Postal History?
Always happy to share information.
Regards.
Ron and Eunice.

Hi Ron and Eunice -- the watermarks show up well in your photographs. You can get a similar result on many scanners if they have a backlight (designed for scanning transparencies). Mike

Thanks Mike,
Neither of our scanners are backlit so we will just have to continue with the sun on windows method as it works OK - grin!
I suppose that watermarks are a bit 'esoteric' but we have been underwhelmed with response.
big grin!
Cheers
Ron.

Ron,
There's nothing esoteric about watermarks! There's even a society for collectors of the damned things! Some of them are very expensive, but they're the older ones, of course. Somewhere in the region of 400-500 hundred years old!

Harvey
Thanks for that - I should have known there would be a society for collectors.

I'm afraid that 350 years is the max. we can manage.
We were interested simply as additions to the 'write up' of the letters - a reaction to the competitive rules which suggested that nothing that was not relevant to the particular 'entry' should not be mentioned.
For instance - an entry of 'Additional Halfpenny markings' should not have anything not relevant to that particular mark.
We want to put as much information as possible about postal markings, content, background history etc. to make things a bit more interesting.
However each to his/her own.
Cheers
Ron and Eunice.

Hi watermark fans (!),

Is there any interest in watermark errors?

I have a few on '37 Coronation cylinder blocks and also on KEVIII cylinder blocks.

Robin R.

Hi Robin,
You may not get too many responses re the watermarks as we were talking watermarks on paper rather than stamps here (grin)
Might be worth starting another thread?
Ron.