I have been buying on ebay for many years and am often surprised by the number of incorrectly attributed plate numbers which appear in dealers’ offerings. My first encounter with this phenomenon was actually from a private member who incorrectly advertised a pair of blacks as being from Plate 6 when they were actually Plate 2. I pointed out the mistake to him and he generously made up for it with a grats 1 black f/u single! (I kept the Pl 2 pair). However, subsequently I have encountered the same problem with several dealers in respect of 1d reds, and I must admit that because in each case the mistake has been to my advantage I have not taken the matter up with them. Let the seller beware!

The whole business does make me wonder about the skillset of some dealers’ staff, when you consider the huge amount of information available to-day to assist with “plating”.

I have had exactly the same problem myself, so much so that i have had to re-plate every line engraved stamp in my collection.
Thank god we now have access to the registration sheets
.

Hi Petrod,
I have been a plater for many years , ive heard that many stamps have been mis plated
in many collections by private collectors. You would expect dealers to be better. I know
that dealers do use experienced collectors to plate for them, saving them a lot of time.
Both my local dealers do not plate stamps because they are general dealers who sold
many other items apart from stamps. I asked one of them if he could plate my penny
black and he refused, even though he sold penny blacks.
Concerning Ebay, it is a minefield, im sure you are aware of this, there will be many wrongly plated stamps on offer.

To be fair, I have found the majority of dealers’ offerings to be correctly attributed, and perhaps it is too much to expect 100% to be correct. But still, if any seller is unsure of the exact description of anything they sell, they should say so (one or two do). My own collection is heavily weighted towards imperf line-engraved so over the years I have probably acquired some nous at “plating”, with not a little help from such as Messrs. Seymour, Brown and Fisher and even occasionally Gibbons. But even so I have to admit that there are probably one or two “doubtfuls” in there.

let them make mistakes.
over the last couple of years i have found a few, including imperf plates 176 and 177 both marked as unplated and under £10, as well as a few harder to come by plates plated wrongly.
But have noticed recently that if you find one in auction plated wrong, several other people also have the ability to plate stamps still on sale and the price goes up.

Been looking at some "Plum" stamps on ebay, i dont think these are dealers. The colour
range has to be seen , some dont even look like they were ever Plum. Also keep seeing
fake high face value GB Queen Victoria, sold as fakes. This is wrong and should not be allowed.

I should perhaps add that my criticism was not aimed at dealers’ prices for various plates but at the inconvenience caused to me when trying to “fill a hole”.

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 letters such that if you have a penny black with 'PB' letters, you click on the "Penny Black PB" link and it takes you to a page showing images of all the plates for the PB position on the sheet. If you click on the plate image a larger, better quality image then opens allowing anyone/everyone to have a go at identifying the plate.

Apologies if everyone knew of this, and I cannot vouch for the quality/reliability of the data - but I thought it was well worth putting out there in case it was not well known the link is below:

https://www.stampsoftheworld.co.uk/wiki ... FqU73ceLH0

Have a great evening,
H