The SG financial results certainly don't make for pleasant reading... I hope they survive and prevail in these challenging times!
H

Thanks very much for this information Mike, I appreciate the time, it looks like its not that common, although saying that I do now have two examples of the variety from the last ~5 years of scouring E-bay every evening for items of interest. I have put in a new scan of both my examples side by side...

I had no response on this and as a result I e-mailed my enquiry to Alan Vaughan (the GBPS Ed VII specialist) who kindly responded very quickly stating: "I have never seen one of these varieties, nor the variety line under bottom frame-line. However I don't spend time on ebay looking; I am obvio...

Thank you WM - always good to have more resources. I have recently been distracted with trying to learn how to plate Penny Blacks (its a slippery slope!) but having another source of information is always useful.
Kind regards,
H

Good evening, Firstly I am not a collector of Penny blacks, but I have a friend who is and whilst looking into something else came across a resource that might be useful to others if they do not already know of it. It is a specific page of the 'Stamps of the World' Wiki site which is organised by le...

Some more interesting viewing WM thank you - I had come across the Exploring Stamps You tube channel previously and it was worth a watch. I am somewhat new to the world of philately, and as such my view on these recent events is largely uninformed and irrelevant to those of more significant experien...

Thanks for the heads up on this... it was an enjoyable watch - I note that there are a number of other videos of interest on the Stanley Gibbons You Tube channel too.
Kind Regards,
H

Hello all - in case you are interested a BBC documentary from 2016 was recently put out again and as such is now available to watch on the BBC iplayer. Its fairly top level and lasts for 1 hour going from the penny black to modern day philately and might be an interesting watch for you if you have a...

Hello learned philatelists... I did a search of the site prior to this enquiry and found no information hence asking my question. I am curious as to how rare the M16h variety (Malformed Large 2) is on the De La Rue, blue, 2 1/2d Edward 7th issue? I was fortunate to stumble across one recently on E-b...

Wow! several hundred overprints should keep you pretty busy - good luck looking through them and yes it'd be great to hear if you find anything of interesting!
Kind Regards,
H

Hi Mike - in case I wasn't clear - I only have limited knowledge of the overprint ink itself (i.e. the words stating "IR Official") on the stamp and how to detect that ink being in blue-black ink and in that instance light transmission microscopy is the way to go. I do not know whether thi...

Hi Mike, Both the late Michael Astley, and the late Tony Wiseman have stated that light transmission microscopy (i.e. shining a light through the stamp) is the best way to identify the blue-black ink varieties on the 1d lilac IR Official overprint issue. The only limitation to this is if the stamp i...